AAODV/AAOMDV Routing Protocols: Single and Multipath Routing in WMNs

Abstract—This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, we propose a new routing protocol, named Adaptive Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AAODV). It is able to establish routes using any per link calculated routing metric, due to its ability to separate the monitoring of the quality of the paths from the routing mechanisms. By using AAODV, the following widely used metrics: hop count, delay, jitter and Expected Transmission Count (ETX) are compared using ns-3 simulations performed in eight randomly generated topologies with different traffic patterns. The results have shown that in the case of random topologies none of the routing metrics used provides significantly better results than the other one. In the second part of our work, the AAODV functionality is enhanced by adding multipath routing and end-to-end Real-Time Monitoring (RTM) of the paths. The new improved protocol is named Adaptive Ad hoc On-Demand Multipath Distance Vector (AAOMDV). AAOMDV provides multiple paths between source and destination nodes, therefore it is mandatory to implement an algorithm that selects the preferred path and switches the traffic on it when this is expected. Our simulations performed in ns-3 provide an inside look into AAOMDV functionality and prove that AAOMDV is able to enhance network performance when the network load increases. Keywords-AODV; AAODV; AAOMDV; multipath; routing metrics; Wireless Mesh Networks I