Reducing Routing Overhead With a Clustering Protocol Based on Ad hoc Distance Vector and Dynamic Source Routing Protocols

Some wireless network applications only need to send data infrequently and at low bit rates. To save costs, these networks use modest devices with limited resources (bandwidth, power) or legacy technology. Technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy, Lora Wide Area Networks (LoRAWAN), Zigbee, legacy WIFI among others, are suited for such applications. Since bandwidth is a limited resource for such networks, route discovery needs to use as little as possible, leaving most of the bandwidth available for data transfer. In this paper, the routing protocol for use in wireless, multihop ad-hoc networks, the Ad-Hoc Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol is compared to a novel routing protocol called Cluster Based AODV (CLUBAA). The comparison is made using simulations, and the results show CLUBAA to have better bandwidth utilization due to its low Normalized Routing Overhead (NRO) for infrequent route discovery requests. The results further expand on the region of the curve where CLUBAA outperformed AODV, showing that there is a niche area where CLUBAA could be a good bandwidth saving alternative to AODV.