Reducing routing overhead of AODV protocol in multi-hop tactical airborne networks

Routing protocols of Mobile Ad hoc networks have long been considered as a viable solution in tactical networks as they provide relatively more robust communication mechanism. AODV´s capability of saturating the whole network with Route Request messages has been a topic of debate for quite some time and scientists have proposed various mechanisms to overcome this issue. In this paper, authors have proposed and evaluated an optimized version of AODV protocol. Performance of this methodology has been evaluated for its efficient applicability in tactical networks. OP-AODV effectively reduces routing overhead associated with AODV protocol. For evaluation of OP-AODV, authors consider the number of Route Request Messages, average end-to-end delay, route discovery time and routing traffic as vital performance metrics.