Performance of modified AODV (waiting AODV) protocol in mobile ad-hoc networks

The highly dynamic nature of the mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) can result many link breakages during data transmission, and hence it causes many packet losses. Some routing protocols, such as AODV, are proposed for this kind of highly mobile networks, which select the least congested or the least hops path between the source and destination. But the least congested path does not guarantee the most stable path. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new enhanced AODV routing protocol, which is based on the most stable path between the source and destination. This new protocol uses the Hello packets of intermediate nodes to find the most stable neighbors, and therefore the most stable path. We call this new protocol WAODV (Waiting AODV), because the network should wait until the nodes accumulate enough Hello packets, and process them before transmitting any data packets. We simulate both our new protocol and AODV with the ns-2 in a similar scenario, and we find that WAODV shows a better performance in packet delivery ratio and throughput in comparison to AODV in most cases.