General study of jitter mechanisms for metric-based wireless routing protocols

Abstract

To ameliorate high collision, a nefarious side effect of route discovery stage of reactive routing protocols in wireless networks, jitter mechanisms are proposed which enforce wireless nodes to postpone their transmission for a random amount of time so as to reduce probability of simultaneous transmission. Although it has been shown that jitter mechanisms can dramatically improve reactive routing protocols, it was not until recently that jitter mechanisms have been subjected to study. In this paper, different random distributions are proposed for jittering mechanisms and also shaping function, with the aim of which a simple routing protocol like AODV becomes sensitive to any arbitrary metric, is defined. Comprehensive simulation of routing metrics and jitter mechanisms have revealed that simple modification of a jitter mechanism, which can be even implemented independent of a routing protocol, greatly improves routes discovered by any routing protocol.