Taguchi's loss function based measurement of mobile ad-hoc network parameters under AODV routing protocol

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network is a collection of autonomous mobile nodes that communicate with each other over wireless links. Such networks are expected to play increasingly important role in future civilian and military settings, being useful for providing communication support where no fixed infrastructure exists or the deployment of a fixed infrastructure is not economically profitable and movement of communicating parties is possible. However, since there is no stationary infrastructure such as base stations, mobile hosts need to operate as routers in order to maintain the information about the network connectivity. Therefore, a number of routing protocols have been proposed for ad hoc wireless networks. This paper presents the application of Taguchi's loss function approach, a multi-response optimization method, for achieving better performance during routing process of ad-hoc on demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol. Seven parameters namely terrain size, network size, number of sources, transmitted packet rates, pause-time, node speed, and transmission range are optimized with considerations of multiple performance metrics including maximum packet delivery ratio and minimum routing overhead, packet drop and end-to-end delay. Based on multiple signal-to-noise ratio (MNSR), optimum levels of parameters have been identified and significant contribution of parameters is determined by analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results show that the terrain size, number of sources, transmission packet rates, network size, pause time, nodes speed and transmission rang are the significant parameters affecting AODV performance in mobile ad-hoc networks.