Routing overhead analysis for reactive routing protocols in wireless ad hoc networks

Although several routing protocols have been proposed that can be used in mobile ad hoc networks, there is very little formal analysis that considers the communication overhead or in other word routing overhead for these procedures. This paper provides a new mathematical framework for quantifying the overhead of reactive routing protocols such as dynamic source routing (DSR) and ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) in wireless ad hoc networks with random location of the nodes. The analysis is compared with the simulations and found to match with the simulation results . The result of this study can be used to predict scalability properties of routing protocols.