Q-AODV: A Flood control Ad-Hoc on Demand Distance Vector Routing Protocol

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self-organized and self-configurable infrastructure less network where the mobile nodes move arbitrarily. One of the major characteristic that differentiate mobile ad-hoc networks from other types of networks is the ability of the mobile nodes to receive and forward packets as a router. The focus of the work is to devise a strategy to control the flooding of control packets through the network in a way to improve the QoS parameters associated with MANETs. The proposed strategy tries to reduce the number of the intermediate nodes that participate in the route discovery process thereby, reducing the total number of control packets that are forwarded by the nodes in the network. This is achieved by controlling the route request (RREQ) broadcast storm using the node's queue length. The source appends a random number with RREQ which is compared with the queue vacancy proportion at each intermediate node. The intermediate node relays the RREQ packet if the random number generated is less than the queue vacancy proportion. This reduces the number of congested nodes forwarding the RREQ packets thereby improving QoS parameters, preserving the energy and increasing the overall network lifetime. The proposed algorithm Q-AODV is advancement over AODV that tries to find a less congested route based on queue vacancy. The proposed algorithm QAODV improves average end to end delay, throughput and jitter, to some extent, as compared to AODV. The simulation has been carried out on Qualnet.