Enhancing AODV performance by improved link metrics

AODV uses the minimum hop count as the connection metric do decide which route out of a set of possible routes should be selected to send a packet from a source to a destination. This metric can however be misleading if a route with a small number of hop counts is congested and interfered by neighbouring stations so that in this case another route could be faster despite of a higher hop count which would mean a worse route in the scope of legacy AODV. This paper investigates the enhancement of the AODV metric by three additional values which take the load and quality of the links along a routing path into account: the signal-to-noise ratio, the number of active neighbours and the queue filling state of individual nodes. Simulation results show that a significant enhancement of the throughput and the delay can be achieved in this way in comparison to legacy AODV. However, the amount of enhancement which is achieved by the different alternative metrics depends on the particular scenario.