A Dynamic Route Optimization Mechanism for AODV in MANETs

In reactive routing protocols, active routes for connections retain their topological structure even when node movements over time make the route sub-optimal (in terms of path length). In AODV, for example, a connection route is recomputed only when one of its constituent links suffers catastrophic failure-at which point repair is initiated, often requiring global route discovery and introducing significant control traffic overhead. In this paper, we propose extensions to AODV which perform continuous route optimization. The objective of our proposed extension is to ensure connection path lengths are topologically efficient in spite of node mobility. Our experiments indicate that in many typical operational regimes, this objective is achieved successfully by our proposed scheme. The proposed mechanism has been implemented and tested in ns2 as an extension to AODV.