On Performance Modeling of Ad Hoc Routing Protocols

Muhammad Saleem,Muddassar Farooq,Syedali Khayam

doi:10.1155/2010/373759

Abstract

Simulation studies have been the predominant method of evaluating ad hoc routing algorithms. Despite their wide use and merits, simulations are generally time consuming. Furthermore, several prominent ad hoc simulations report inconsistent and unrepeatable results. We, therefore, argue that simulation-based evaluation of ad hoc routing protocols should be complemented with mathematical verification and comparison. In this paper, we propose a performance evaluation framework that can be used to model two key performance metrics of an ad hoc routing algorithm, namely, routing overhead and route optimality. We also evaluate derivatives of the two metrics, namely, total energy consumption and route discovery latency. Using the proposed framework, we evaluate the performance of four prominent ad hoc routing algorithms: DSDV, DSR, AODV-LL, and Gossiping. We show that the modeled metrics not only allow unbiased performance comparison but also provide interesting insight about the impact of different parameters on the behavior of these protocols.

Highlights

Since the inception of MANETs and sensor networks, a number of routing protocols have been proposed to efficiently discover and maintain paths in an ad hoc network [1,2,3,4,5,6]
To study the effect of modeling assumptions on the evaluated routing metrics, we compare the analytical results with the results reported in an independently-conducted simulation study [8] and show that our modeling assumptions do not have a significant effect on the results
We elaborate the adaptation of our generic routing overhead model for DYMO protocol that uses an expanding ring search mechanism to control the route request (RREQ) flooding

Summary

Introduction

Since the inception of MANETs and sensor networks, a number of routing protocols have been proposed to efficiently discover and maintain paths in an ad hoc network [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Due to lack of infrastructure and resources required to set up an ad hoc network, most of the routing protocols are evaluated and compared using network simulators. We argue that simulation-based evaluation should be complemented with mathematical modeling of key performance parameters of ad hoc routing protocols. Such an approach will allow unbiased and provable performance comparison of the routing protocol even on very largescale networks. An analytical approach will allow researchers to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a protocol at an early design stage

Results

Discussion

Conclusion