Enhancement on route discovery mechanism of THE AODV routing protocol for MANET

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a decentralized network of mobile devices connected together wirelessly to be able to communicate with each other. This kind of wireless network is expected to be adaptable to frequent topology and location change. Mobile devices (nodes) that compose a MANET are equipped with wireless transmitters and receivers using antennas. This kind of network is deployed in fast-paced operations such as emergency/rescue operations and in military terms that need a reliable network for better communication. One of the most well-known routing protocols for MANET\u27s is Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV). AODV is a reactive protocol that searches for routes only on-demand and therefore it does not send regular advertisements to update routing tables like what proactive protocols do but instead it floods Route Request Packets (RREQ) to other nodes and passes those requests to its adjacent neighbors until the request reaches its destination. The design of AODV however, is that the flooding mechanism for route discovery contributes to large delays and overheads when data needs to be transmitted. This causes a problem for large and mobile networks during military or rescue operations that need data with minimum delay. Thus, this study aims to make the AODV routing protocol scalable for large mobile networks by implementing a clustering scheme called the K-CONID. This cluster scheme elects the cluster head based on the number of neighbor nodes. The enhancement of AODV also includes controlling RREQ on how it broadcasts throughout the network. This way, the flooding in the network will be reduced which results to lower route discovery delay, higher throughput, higher packet success rate, lower control overhead, and higher path optimally and lower energy consumption compared to the original AODV protocol scheme