Evaluating the impact of next node selection criteria on Quality of Service dynamic routing

Dynamic routing is considered an attractive solution for many network applications such as monitoring and tracking. In dynamic routing the path between the source and the destination can change dynamically following the network conditions. Next node selection criteria can have a great impact on the selection of each path and as a consequence on the network performance. Moreover, each network application may have different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we examine the impact of the next node selection criteria on the network performance. Three routing protocols with different approaches along with their routing algorithms are presented. To examine the performance of each approach a discrete event simulator is used. It is shown that the selection criteria should be carefully designed following the QoS requirements of the network application. Furthermore, the obtained performance results can be used as an indicator of the appropriateness of a dynamic protocol for a variety of applications.