Analyzing Path Accumulation for Route Discovery in Ad Hoc Networks

Despite the large amount of research in ad hoc networks, there are still several limitations on the scalability and performance of routing protocols, which require a more fundamental understanding of some of the basic mechanisms. In this paper, we focus on one of these mechanisms, which is route discovery, and analyze its extent and overhead in discovering routes to nodes in the network. Gwalani et al. (2003) has augmented route discovery in AODV with a mechanism called path accumulation, that allows additional routes to be propagated through the network. We provide detailed analysis and simulations for the potential benefits of path accumulation and apply it on one of the prominent ad hoc routing protocols, AODV. The results show that path accumulation can improve the performance of AODV and reduce its overhead significantly.