Performance Evaluation of Switching between Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Ad-hoc networks employ routing protocols so that out-of-range nodes can communicate with each other via intermediate nodes. The innate dynamicity and complexity of mobile ad-hoc networks has resulted in numerous routing protocols for ad-hoc networks being proposed. Furthermore, numerous variants and hybrids of these existing protocols continue to be reported in literature. This diversity appears to be inherent to the field and it seems unlikely that there will ever be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to the ad-hoc routing problem.

However, typical deployment environments for routing protocol for ad-hoc networks still force the choice of a single fixed protocol and the resultant compromise can easily lead to sub-optimal performance, depending on current operating conditions. In our work we try to address this problem by switching between protocols that best suits the current working environment. Details about the current network environment are obtained by sensing the network. The protocols chosen for conducting the switching operation are AODV (reactive) and DSDV (proactive). We measure the performance of such an implementation and compare the results with their monolithic counterparts to see if such a switching is feasible.