Reliability of dynamic source routing in heterogeneous scalable mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are increasingly being used in various applications for civilian, commercial, and military uses. However, unique characteristics of MANETs introduce several challenges such as routing and mobility management. Nodes frequent movements make routing more difficult due to frequent topology changes. Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) routing protocol is among the common routing protocols that suffer from poor performance in highly dynamic environment. This paper presents an extensive study of the performance of DSR in heterogeneous scalable MANET that involves different nodes with different resources where no prior information about the destinations is available. The study shows that DSR performance suffers significantly over heterogeneous MANETs with respect to network sizes and resources.