An adaptive mechanism to resolve the DSR cached route reply storm of multi-hop wireless networks

Abstract

As one of the representative routing protocols for the Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET), the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol broadcasts Route Request (RREQ) messages to the entire network to find out routes from a source to a destination node. If an intermediate node has the route information to the corresponding destination, it sends a cached Route Reply (RREP) message back to the source node without broadcasting the RREQ message any further. Since the neighbor nodes have high possibility of having the route information to the destination, the cached RREP storm problem can happen. In order to avoid this type of collisions, DSR requires intermediate nodes to have some delay before sending out the cached RREP message. However, DSR does not define how to avoid superfluous generation of cached RREP messages. Hence, in this paper, we propose a mechanism that adaptively generates cached RREP messages according to the network situation. We show the performance of our proposed mechanism by the NS-3 based simulations.