Improved AODV with restricted route discovery area

Mobile Ad Hoc Network [MANET] is a network that changes location and organize itself on the fly. The low resource availability demands efficient utilization and motivates optimal routing. This paper introduces an Improved AODV (I-AODV) protocol which considers the location and energy of nodes. Route discovery area is restricted based on the source and destination location. The nodes lying in this region are considered for routing. In the proposed method one hop communication takes place when the two nodes lie in the communicating range of each other. If the communicating nodes are far away then the intermediate nodes lying within the 75% communication range of source and having the distance between the selected intermediate node and destination less than other intermediate nodes distance with destination node are selected. The selected intermediate node is also checked for having energy greater than threshold energy which increases the lifetime of the path. Nodes involved in one communication session are not involved in other communication session, since participation of a node in more than one session will drain out energy soon leading to path break. The other nodes out of region do not participate in the routing process. The basic AODV protocol is compared with the proposed Improved-AODV (I-AODV) protocol considering the three metrics: packet delivery ratio, routing overhead & control overhead and energy consumption. The simulation results show that there is an average improvement of 6.72 times in packet delivery ratio, an average improvement of 1.58 times on routing and control overhead and 14.67 times of average reduction in terms of energy consumption with respect to basic AODV protocol.