DSDV-Het: A new scalable routing protocol for large heterogeneous Ad Hoc networks

The traditional Ad Hoc routing protocols do not scale well in heterogeneous networks, since they have not been designed to exploit different communication capabilities of network nodes. Building a heterogeneous hierarchical structure is a promising approach to achieve higher scalability in heterogeneous Ad Hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a novel heterogonous routing protocol based on DSDV, called DSDV-Het, which utilizes some long range high capacity links as part of its routings. The protocol dynamically partitions the network nodes into multi-hop clusters (zones) in which a cluster-head is elected in a distributed manner to be a backbone node (BN). Next, the BNs are connected to each other via some long range high-capacity links (such as satellite or 4G). Then, the ordinary mobile Ad Hoc nodes automatically discover nearby BNs and use their help to route the packets toward their destinations. Our NS2 simulation results indicate that DSDV-Het can greatly improve the performance in large heterogeneous networks compare to the classic flat DSDV protocol. Our results show that throughput and packet delivery ratio of network are significantly increased in DSDV-Het protocol, moreover overhead of control packets is reduced considerably.