Effect of Adapter Promiscuous Mode Operation on DSR Performance in MANETs

The route discovery stage in MANET routing requires multi-hop message communication and is a crucial stage of any MANET routing protocol. Any optimization which increases the overall effectiveness in terms of routing efficiency and power utilization would improve the MANET performance. In this paper, we present our study of the effect of promiscuous mode operation of the wireless adapters on the dynamic source routing protocol (DSR) performance in different mobility and density conditions. DSR is an on-demand routing protocol that is actively being studied by IETF for standardization. The performance, especially with respect to power dissipation is observed and we correlate this with the packet delivery ratio and present our recommendations. Contrary to the expectation that an adapter in promiscuous mode would unnecessarily dissipate more energy, from our simulations we find that the overall MANET efficiency is enhanced