Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector
Encyclopedia
Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) Routing is a routing protocol for mobile ad hoc network
Mobile ad hoc network
A mobile ad-hoc network is a self-configuring infrastructureless network of mobile devices connected by wireless links. ad hoc is Latin and means "for this purpose"....

s (MANETs) and other wireless ad-hoc network
Wireless ad-hoc network
A wireless ad-hoc network is a decentralized type of wireless network. The network is ad hoc because it does not rely on a preexisting infrastructure, such as routers in wired networks or access points in managed wireless networks...

s. It is jointly developed in Nokia Research Center, University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Barbara
The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a site in Goleta, California, from Santa Barbara and northwest of Los...

 and University of Cincinnati
University of Cincinnati
The University of Cincinnati is a comprehensive public research university in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a part of the University System of Ohio....

 by C. Perkins, E. Belding-Royer and S. Das.

It is a reactive routing protocol, meaning that it establishes a route to a destination only on demand. In contrast, the most common routing protocols of the Internet are proactive, meaning they find routing paths independently of the usage of the paths. AODV is, as the name indicates, a distance-vector routing protocol
Distance-vector routing protocol
In computer communication theory relating to packet-switched networks, a distance-vector routing protocol is one of the two major classes of routing protocols, the other major class being the link-state protocol...

. AODV avoids the counting-to-infinity problem of other distance-vector protocols by using sequence numbers on route updates, a technique pioneered by DSDV. AODV is capable of both unicast
Unicast
right|200pxIn computer networking, unicast transmission is the sending of messages to a single network destination identified by a unique address.-Addressing methodologies:...

 and multicast
Multicast
In computer networking, multicast is the delivery of a message or information to a group of destination computers simultaneously in a single transmission from the source creating copies automatically in other network elements, such as routers, only when the topology of the network requires...

 routing.

For other alternatives see the Ad hoc routing protocol list
Ad hoc routing protocol list
An ad-hoc routing protocol is a convention, or standard, that controls how nodes decide which way to route packets between computing devices in a mobile ad hoc network ....

.

Workings

In AODV, the network
Computer network
A computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of hardware components and computers interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information....

 is silent until a connection is needed. At that point the network node that needs a connection broadcasts a request for connection. Other AODV nodes forward this message, and record the node that they heard it from, creating an explosion of temporary routes back to the needy node. When a node receives such a message and already has a route to the desired node, it sends a message backwards through a temporary route to the requesting node. The needy node then begins using the route that has the least number of hops through other nodes. Unused entries in the routing table
Routing table
In computer networking a routing table, or Routing Information Base , is a data table stored in a router or a networked computer that lists the routes to particular network destinations, and in some cases, metrics associated with those routes. The routing table contains information about the...

s are recycled after a time.

When a link
Data link
In telecommunication a data link is the means of connecting one location to another for the purpose of transmitting and receiving information. It can also refer to a set of electronics assemblies, consisting of a transmitter and a receiver and the interconnecting data telecommunication circuit...

 fails, a routing error is passed back to a transmitting node, and the process repeats.

Much of the complexity of the protocol
Communications protocol
A communications protocol is a system of digital message formats and rules for exchanging those messages in or between computing systems and in telecommunications...

 is to lower the number of messages to conserve the capacity of the network. For example, each request for a route has a sequence number. Nodes use this sequence number so that they do not repeat route requests that they have already passed on. Another such feature is that the route requests have a "time to live" number that limits how many times they can be retransmitted. Another such feature is that if a route request fails, another route request may not be sent until twice as much time has passed as the timeout of the previous route request.

The advantage of AODV is that it creates no extra traffic for communication along existing links. Also, distance vector routing is simple, and doesn't require much memory or calculation. However AODV requires more time to establish a connection, and the initial communication to establish a route is heavier than some other approaches.

Technical description

The AODV Routing protocol uses an on-demand approach for finding routes, that is, a route is established only when it is required by a source node for transmitting data packets. It employs destination sequence numbers to identify the most recent path. The major difference between AODV and Dynamic Source Routing
Dynamic Source Routing
'Dynamic Source Routing' is a routing protocol for wireless mesh networks. It is similar to AODV in that it forms a route on-demand when a transmitting computer requests one...

 (DSR) stems out from the fact that DSR uses source routing in which a data packet carries the complete path to be traversed. However, in AODV, the source node and the intermediate nodes store the next-hop information corresponding to each flow for data packet transmission. In an on-demand routing protocol, the source node floods the RouteRequest packet in the network when a route is not available for the desired destination. It may obtain multiple routes to different destinations from a single RouteRequest. The major difference between AODV and other on-demand routing protocols is that it uses a destination sequence number (DestSeqNum) to determine an up-to-date path to the destination. A node updates its path information only if the DestSeqNum of the current packet received is greater than the last DestSeqNum stored at the node.

A RouteRequest carries the source identifier (SrcID), the destination identifier (DestID), the source sequence number (SrcSeqNum), the destination sequence number (DestSeqNum), the broadcast identifier (BcastID), and the time to live
Time to live
Time to live is a mechanism that limits the lifespan of data in a computer or network. TTL may be implemented as a counter or timestamp attached to or embedded in the data. Once the prescribed event count or timespan has elapsed, data is discarded. In computer networking, TTL prevents a data...

(TTL) field. DestSeqNum indicates the freshness of the route that is accepted by the source. When an intermediate node receives a RouteRequest, it either forwards it or prepares a RouteReply if it has a valid route to the destination. The validity of a route at the intermediate node is determined by comparing the sequence number at the intermediate node with the destination sequence number in the RouteRequest packet. If a RouteRequest is received multiple times, which is indicated by the BcastID-SrcID pair, the duplicate copies are discarded. All intermediate nodes having valid routes to the destination, or the destination node itself, are allowed to send RouteReply packets to the source. Every intermediate node, while forwarding a RouteRequest, enters the previous node address and its BcastID. A timer is used to delete this entry in case a RouteReply is not received before the timer expires. This helps in storing an active path at the intermediate node as AODV does not employ source routing of data packets. When a node receives a RouteReply packet, information about the previous node from which the packet was received is also stored in order to forward the data packet to this next node as the next hop toward the destination.

Advantages and disadvantages

The main advantage of this protocol is having routes established on demand and that destination sequence numbers are applied for find the latest route to the destination. The connection setup delay is lower. One disadvantage of this protocol is that intermediate nodes can lead to inconsistent routes if the source sequence number is very old and the intermediate nodes have a higher but not the latest destination sequence number, thereby having stale entries. Also, multiple RouteReply packets in response to a single RouteRequest packet can lead to heavy control overhead. Another disadvantage of AODV is unnecessary bandwidth consumption due to periodic beaconing.

See also

  • Mesh networks
  • Wireless mesh network
    Wireless mesh network
    A wireless mesh network is a communications network made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. Wireless mesh networks often consist of mesh clients, mesh routers and gateways.The mesh clients are often laptops, cell phones and other wireless devices while the mesh routers forward traffic...

  • ZigBee
    ZigBee
    ZigBee is a specification for a suite of high level communication protocols using small, low-power digital radios based on an IEEE 802 standard for personal area networks. Applications include wireless light switches, electrical meters with in-home-displays, and other consumer and industrial...

  • Mobile ad hoc network
    Mobile ad hoc network
    A mobile ad-hoc network is a self-configuring infrastructureless network of mobile devices connected by wireless links. ad hoc is Latin and means "for this purpose"....

  • Backpressure Routing
    Backpressure Routing
    This article describes backpressure routing forqueueing networks. It shows how the algorithm is derived and how its optimality is establishedusing concepts of Lyapunov drift....


External links

  • http://moment.cs.ucsb.edu/AODV/aodv.html
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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