Interference-Aware Ad-hoc on Demand Distance Vector (IA-AODV) protocol

Ultra-wideband (UWB) is a promising technology for wireless personal area networks (WPANs) and sensor networks. In particular, it is a viable candidate for short/medium-range communications. These motivations lead IEEE and scientific community to increase research on UWB technology. Many studies have been already addressed UWB physical and MAC problematic, but, at the present, many challenges are yet opened on the UWB routing level. However, traditional routing approach based on hop count or geometric criterions can be inadequate due to mutual interference affecting UWB nodes. The main goal of our work is to propose a new routing protocol, called interference aware-based ad-hoc on demand distance vector (IA-AODV), based on the concept of interference: the optimum route is chosen on the basis of the minimum perceived interference. Two distinct metrics are proposed: the first one based on the global interference perceived by a node (NI) and the other one based on the link interference (LI). To test the proposed protocol a ns-2 based simulator was realized. The two proposed metrics were compared with the AODV protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and normalized overhead. Simulation results show as LI metric outperforms the others in all considered scenarios: only in few cases, LI IA-AODV presents an overhead slightly higher than AODV.