Scenario-based comparison of source-tracing and dynamic source routing protocols for ad-hoc networks

We present source-tracing as a new viable approach to routing in ad-hoc networks where routers communicate the second-to-last hop and distance in preferred paths to destinations. We use two source-tracing algorithms, a table-driven protocol (BEST) in which routers maintain routing information for all destinations, and an on-demand routing protocol (DST) in which routers maintain routing information for only those destinations to whom they need to forward data. Simulation experiments are used to compare these protocols with DSR, which has been shown to incur less control overhead than other on-demand routing protocols. The simulations show that DST requires far less control packets to achieve comparable or better average delays and percentage of packet delivered than DSR, and that BEST achieves comparable results to DSR while maintaining routing information for all destinations