Performance of the Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing Protocol

The amount of wireless communication devices has increased dramatically over the last few years. This has created new kinds of requirements to the technology as the growing number of users want to be able to communicate with each other anywhere and anytime without having to rely on any existing infrastructure or centralized access point. Adhoc network is composed of a collection of mobile nodes co-operating together to form a such network. Every node in ad hoc network acts both as a host and a router, which eliminates the need for existing infrastructure. Ad-hoc Ondemand Distance Vector Routing protocol (AODV) is one of the developed protocols that enable routing with continuously changing topologies. AODV is reactive which means that it builds routes only when they are first needed. It uses extensive flooding of messages when discovering routes but tries to increase the overall bandwidth available by minimizing the use of any periodic advertisements. The increasing popularity of these on-the-fly networks has arisen the question about the efficiency and accuracy of the routing protocols used. This paper presents the performance and scalability of the AODV protocol both in small and large networks.