Cluster overlay-dynamic source routing: Highly scalable routing protocol

Scalable routing is one of the key challenges in designing and operating large scale MANETs. Performance of routing protocols proposed so far is only guaranteed under the various limitation, i.e., dependent of the number of nodes in the network or needs the location information of destination node. Due to the dependency to the number of nodes in the network, as the number of nodes increases the performance of previous routing protocols degrade dramatically. We propose Cluster Overlay Dynamic Source Routing (CODSR) protocol. We conduct performance analysis by means of computer simulation under various conditions - diameter scaling and density scaling. Developed algorithm outperforms the DSR algorithm, e.g., more than 90% improvement as for the normalized routing load. Operation of CODSR is very simple and we show that the message and time complexity of CODSR is independent of the number of nodes in the network which makes CODSR highly scalable.