Perkins “Scalability Study of the Ad Hoc OnDemand Distance Vector Routing Protocol

Abstract — As mobile networking continues to experience increasing popularity, the need to connect large numbers of wireless devices will become more prevalent. Many re-cent proposals for ad hoc routing have certain characteris-tics which may limit their scalability to large networks. This paper examines five different combinations of modifications which may be incorporated into virtually any on-demand protocol in order to improve its scalability. The scalability of current on-demand routing protocols is evaluated through the selection of a representative from this class of protocols. The performance of the un-modified on-demand protocol is compared against that of it combined with each of the scal-ability modifications. Each scheme’s behavior is analyzed in networks as large as 10,000 nodes through detailed simula-tion. Based on the observations, conclusions are drawn as to the expected scalability improvement which can be achieved by each modification. I