Performance Improvement of AODV Routing Algorithm Using Timestamp

One of the seminal operation parameters of AODV is the node-to-node travel time of data, which is currently set to fixed value of 40 ms in the RFC3561 and widely used to compute other parameters such as the expected round-trip time of the connection setup message, etc. We have naturally thought the network performance could be improved by dynamically varying the node-to-node travel time with respect to the traffic condition in the networt rather than using the fixed value, which motivates this work. To this end, we apply the idea of using timestamp; every node places the current time in the message before sending it out, and the receiver node computes the node travel time based on the moving average algorithm by considering not only the current value but also the previous ones in an accumulated and exponentially decreasing fashion with time. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in respect of the number of RREQ messages generated, throughput, and delay as a function of traffic load and node mobility, and compare the result with the original AODV scheme. The results show that the proposed scheme presents noticeable performance improvements, expecially under the condition of high node mobility and high traffic load.