An efficient DSDV routing protocol for MANET and its usefulness for providing Internet access to Ad Hoc Hosts

One of the popular wireless network architectures is mobile ad hoc network (MANET) which can be deployed easily in almost any environment, without any underlying backbone and infrastructure support. The MANET Nodes (Routers and Hosts) can move randomly and re-organize themselves into an arbitrary network. Because of the limited range of each hostpsilas wireless transmission, to communicate with hosts outside its transmission range, a host needs to forward the packets with the help of nearby hosts to the destination. In this paper, an Efficient DSDV (Eff-DSDV) routing protocol is proposed for ad hoc networks. Eff-DSDV overcomes the problem of stale routes, and thereby improves the performance of regular DSDV. The proposed protocol has been implemented in the NCTUns Simulator and performance comparison has been made with regular DSDV protocol using performance metrics packet-delivery ratio, end-end delay, dropped packets, routing overhead, route length by varying the number of nodes in the network and the mobility speed of the ad hoc hosts. It is observed from the simulation results that the performance of Eff-DSDV is superior to regular DSDV with respect to all the said metrics except the routing overhead. The routing overhead is bound to be higher for Eff-DSDV due to the extra route requests and route reply messages which otherwise is not present in regular DSDV. Lastly in the paper, we discuss the usefulness of Eff-DSDV as a routing protocol in the integration of the mobile network and the Internet.