COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MULTIPATH EXTENSIONS OF AODV

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a multi-hop wire less network with dynamically changing topology. Wi th the development of MANET technology, various routing protocols have be en proposed over the years with minimum control ove rhead and network resources. AODV is the most popular routing protoco l among others. It is a single path, loop free, On- demand type routing protocol and its performance is better than other routing pr otocols in MANET environment. However, single path abstraction is considered one of the biggest drawbacks of AODV. Also, it has more routing overhead both at the time of route dis covery and route repair. In the networks with light traffic and low mobility AODV sflawlessly to the larger networks with low ba ndwidth and storage overhead. But in networks with heavy traffic, a big number of routes will break resulting in repeated route disco veries and error reports in the network, which is an overhead. The mobile nodes in MANET have limited resources such as battery power, limited bandwidth which the single path protocols cannot handle efficiently . Thus routing is a vital issue in the design of a MANET. Multipath routing allows the establishment of multiple paths between a singl e source and single destination node. Researchers h ave proposed many multipath extensions of AODV protocol to establish reliable c ommunication and ensure better load balancing than the conventional protocol. This paper reviews some multipath extensions of AOD V routing protocol and a comparative study is done. There is no frontrunner of the comparison, but there are important inferences for scholars who will design new routing protocols in future.