Enhanced AODV Routing Protocol with Paging in Heterogeneous IP-Based Networks

As wireless IP-based networks become more popular and larger in size and coverage, simple mobility management protocols cannot deal with the demands. With the growing access to the Internet, mobility can be divided into macro/micro-mobility domains. Macro-mobility can be efficiently handled with Mobile IP and its derivatives but they do not scale that well for the micro-mobility case. An alternative for micro-mobility domains is to use a reactive route discovery mechanism. Ad-hoc routing protocols such as DSR and AODV are the well known protocols that can be used for this purpose. The disadvantage of the reactive approach is that the route discovery process becomes costly in terms of control overhead and latency of the connection setup when done frequently. In this paper, an optimization of the simple AODV route discovery is proposed, introducing a paging extension. The proposed mechanism is somewhat similar to other paging schemes like Cellular IP, but introduces modifications and enhancements for reducing the paging control overhead. Simulation results of AODV and the enhanced route discovery with paging are presented along with the performance evaluation of both schemes. The simulations were performed with the QualNet Network Simulator.