Summary of Multipath Routing Protocols

Multiple paths can be used to provide load balancing, fault tolerance, and bandwidth aggregation. Load balancing can alleviate congestion and bottlenecks. It can be achieved by disseminating the traffic through multiple routes. From a fault toler-ance perspective, multipath routing reduces the probability that communication is disrupted when a link failure occurs. Moreover, if congestion occurs, multipath rout-ing protocols can divert traffic through alternate paths to alleviate the burden of the congested link. When data is split into multiple streams and routed simultaneously

through multiple paths, the aggregate bandwidth of the paths may satisfy the band-width required for the application.

3.7 Summary

Several routing protocols for wireless ad hoc networks have been presented in this chapter. In this section, we present a summary the most routing protocols introduced in this chapter, and list the differences between them in two tables according to dif-ferent criteria.

AODV is one of the most popular and widely researched on-demand ad hoc routing protocols. One advantage of AODV is that less memory space is required as only in-formation on active routes is maintained, in turn increasing its performance. AODV is also adaptable to highly small dynamic networks. However, a node may experi-ence large delays during route construction, and link failure may initiate more route discovery, which introduces extra delays and consumes more bandwidth as the size of the network increases. Moreover, the protocol is not very scalable.

The DSDV routing protocol is a basis for several protocols such as AODV. It guaran-tees loop free paths and reduces the Count to infinity problem. DSDV is well suited to small ad hoc networks where changes in the topology are limited. The DSDV proto-col overhead is directly proportional to the number of nodes in the network. Therefore the protocol will not scale well in large networks since a large portion of the network bandwidth would then be used in the updating procedures. DSR is a source-routed on-demand protocol. An advantage of DSR is that nodes can store multiple routes in their route cache, which means that there is no need to initiate route discovery if a valid route is available there. This is beneficial in networks with low mobility, since the routes stored in the route cache will be valid longer. Another advantage of DSR is that it does not require periodic routing packets, therefore nodes can enter sleep mode to conserve their power. This also saves a considerable amount of bandwidth in

the network. Since DSR discovers routes on-demand, it may have poor performance in terms of control overhead in networks with high mobility and heavy traffic loads.

DSR has a high delay especially for networks with large traffic loads. The main rea-son for this is the lack of a mechanism that can expire unused routes from caches, together with the aggressive use of caching.

The advantage of TORA is that it has reduced the scope of control messages to a set of neighbouring nodes, where a topology change has occurred. TORA can be used in conjunction with a lightweight adaptive multicast algorithm (LAM) to pro-vide multicasting. The disadvantage of TORA is that the algorithm may also produce temporarily invalid routes.

ZRP is based on the notion of routing zones that are defined for each node. An advan-tage of this protocol is that it has significantly reduced the amount of communication overhead when compared to pure proactive protocols. It has also reduced the delays associated with pure reactive protocols such as DSR, by allowing routes to be discov-ered faster. This is because, to determine a route to a node outside the routing zone, the routing only has to travel to a node which lies on the boundaries of the desired destination. A disadvantage of ZRP is that for large routing zones the protocol be-haves like a pure proactive protocol, while for small ones it bebe-haves like a reactive protocol.

DDR is a tree-based routing protocol. An advantage of DDR is that it does not rely on a static zone map to perform routing and it does not require a root node or a clusterhead to coordinate data and control packet transmission among different nodes and zones. However, the nodes that have been selected as preferred neighbours may become performance bottlenecks. This is because, they may transmit more routing and data packets than every other node. This means that these nodes would require more recharging as they will have less sleep time than other nodes. Furthermore, if a node is a preferred neighbour for many of its neighbours, many nodes may need to communicate with it. This means that channel contention would increase around the preferred neighbour, which could result in larger delays experienced by all neigh-bouring nodes before they can reserve the medium. In networks with high traffic, this

may also result in significant reduction in throughput, due to packets being dropped when buffers become full.

In DST the nodes in the network are grouped into a number of trees. Each tree has two types of nodes: route nodes and internal nodes. A major disadvantage of the DST algorithm is that it relies on a root node to configure the tree, which creates a single point of failure. Furthermore, the holding time used to buffer the packets may introduce extra delays in the network.

ZHLS is a hybrid routing protocol. It is highly adaptable to dynamic topologies and it generates far less overhead than pure reactive protocols, which means that it may scale well to large networks. A disadvantage of ZHLS is that all nodes must have a preprogrammed static zone map in order to function. This may not feasible in appli-cations where the geographical boundary of the network is dynamic.

In WRP, each node maintains four routing tables. This introduces a significant amount of memory overhead at each node as the size of the network increases. Another dis-advantage of WRP is that it ensures connectivity through the use of hello messages, which are exchanged among neighbouring nodes whenever there is no recent packet transmission. This consumes a significant amount of bandwidth and power as each node is required to stay active at all times (i.e., they cannot enter sleep mode to con-serve their power).

In GSR, each node maintains a link state table based on the up-to-date information received from neighbouring nodes, and periodically exchanges its link state informa-tion only with neighbouring nodes. This significantly reduces the number of control message transmitted through the network. However, the size of update messages is relatively large, and as the size of the network grows they get even larger. Therefore, a considerable amount of bandwidth is consumed by these update messages.

FSR reduces the size of the update messages by updating the network information for nearby nodes at a higher frequency than for the remote nodes, which lie outside the fisheye scope. This makes FSR more scalable to large networks than other protocols.

However, scalability comes at the price of reduced accuracy. This is because as mo-bility increases the routes to remote destination become less accurate. This can be

overcome by making the frequency at which updates are sent to remote destinations proportional to the level of mobility. However it would increase its use of bandwidth.

In DREAM, each node knows its geographical coordinates using a GPS sensor. These coordinates are periodically exchanged among nodes which enables each node to ob-tain location information about other nodes in the network. The coordinates are stored in a routing table called a location table. The advantage of exchanging location in-formation is that it consumes significantly less bandwidth than exchanging complete link state or distance vector information, which means that it is more scalable. In DREAM, routing overhead is further reduced, by making the frequency with which update messages are disseminated proportional to mobility and the distance effect.

This means that stationary nodes do not need to send any update messages.

CGSR is a hierarchical routing protocol where the nodes are grouped into clusters.

An advantage of this protocol is that it can reduce the routing table size by storing only one entry for all nodes in the same cluster. Thus, the broadcast packet size of the routing table is reduced. A disadvantage of CGSR is the difficulty of maintaining the cluster structure in a mobile environment.

OLSR is a proactive link-state routing protocol and does not need a central adminis-trative system to handle its routing process. One of its advantages is that it immedi-ately knows the status of the link, so that nodes know the quality of the route. OLSR is more efficient in networks with high density and highly sporadic traffic. However, a drawback of the OLSR protocol is that it makes each node periodically broadcast updated topology information throughout the entire network, which increases the pro-tocol’s bandwidth usage. But the flooding is minimised by the MPRs, which are the only nodes that are allowed to forward the topological messages. When the number of nodes increases, the overhead from control message traffic also increases. So, the scalability is constrained.

TBRPF is a link-state based routing protocol, which performs hop-by-hop routing.

The protocol uses the reverse-path forwarding (RPF) to disseminate its update pack-ets in the reverse direction along the spanning tree. In TBRPF, each node reduces that overhead by reporting only part of its source tree to its neighbours. The reportable

part of each source tree is exchanged with neighbouring nodes by periodic and differ-ential hello messages. Differdiffer-ential hello messages only report changes in the status the neighbouring nodes. As a result, hello messages in TBRPF are smaller than in protocols which report the complete link-state information.

The routing protocols that are based on the source routing protocol (DSR) such as SMR and NDMR cannot scale to large networks because source routing requires ev-ery data packet to carry the full path to its destination. In large networks, the size of data packets become prohibitively high due to the long paths that they carry.

Table 3.6 and Table 3.7 present some properties of the protocols that are discussed in this chapter. As many routing protocols use distance vector or link state as their underlying mechanism to transmit update packets and compute routes, we consider Link State Routing (LSR) and Distance Vector Routing (DVR) as the basis of this comparison. The meanings of some items in the tables are presented below.

Route Computationindicates when the route is computed (precomputed, on-demand, or hybrid). The computation in proactive protocols may be done by the nodes them-selves or collaboratively. However, in reactive protocols, the computation is done by broadcasting a QUERY message that propagates through the entire network to dis-cover a route. Stored Information is information stored in each node. Update Period is applicable to proactive protocols and assumes values such as “periodical”, “event-driven” or “hybrid”. For reactive protocols, when a link failure occurs, route main-tenance is activated. This is called event-driven route mainmain-tenance. Update Infor-mationdenotes the type of information that is included in the update and the Update Destinationindicates the nodes that receive the information. Generally, the Update Informationis the link state and Update Destination is the “neighbours”. However, for event-driven route maintenance, the Update Information is generally by an “ER-ROR” message and the Update Destination is the source node. Finally, the Update Methodindicates how the information is disseminated (broadcasting, unicasting, etc.) Note: BR stands for Beacon Requirement.(or Hello Message Requirement)

3.MANETRoutingProtocols Protocols Route Computation Structure Number of Routes Source Routing Route Reconfiguration Methodology BR*

LSR Proactive/itself Flat Single or multiple No, may Yes N/A No

DVR Proactive/distributed Flat Single No N/A No

AODV Reactive/broadcast QUERY Flat Multiple No Erase route, Notify source Yes

AODV-BR Reactive/broadcast QUERY mesh Multiple No Local repair, Notify source & neighbours Yes

AODVM Reactive/broadcast QUERY Flat Multiple No Erase route, Notify source yes

AOMDV Reactive/broadcast QUERY Flat Multiple No Erase route, Notify source yes

CGSR Proactive/distributed Hierarchy Single No N/A No

DDR Proactive(intra)/Reactive(inter) Hierarchy Multiple No Notify source to initiate route discovery yes

DMPSR Reactive/broadcast QUERY Flat Multiple yes Erase route, Notify source No

DREAM Proactive/distributed Flat Multiple No N/A No

DSDV Proactive/distributed Flat Single No N/A No

DSR Reactive/broadcast QUERY Flat Multiple Yes Erase route, Notify source No

DST Reactive/broadcast QUERY Hierarchy single but may multiple No, may yes Route repair No

FSR Proactive/distributed Hierarchy Single or multiple No, may Yes N/A No

GSR Proactive/distributed Flat Single or multiple No, may Yes N/A No

MDSDV Proactive/distributed Flat Multiple No Local repair, Notify source & neighbours Yes

NDMR Reactive/broadcast QUERY Flat Multiple Yes Erase route, Notify source Yes

OLSR Proactive/distributed Hierarchy Single No N/A Yes

SHARP Proactive/Reactive (zone radius) Flat Single No Link reversal, Route repair Yes

SMORT Reactive/broadcast QUERY Flat Multiple No Replace primary route with secondary route No

SMR Reactive/broadcast QUERY Flat Multiple yes Erase route, Notify source No

TBRPF Proactive/distributed Flat single but may multiple No Select a new parent, Notify source Yes

TORA Reactive/broadcast QUERY Flat Multiple (DAG) No Link reversal, Route repair No

WRP Proactive/distributed Flat Single No N/A Yes

ZHLS Proactive(intra)/Reactive(inter) Hierarchy Single No Location request No

ZRP Proactive(intra)/Reactive(inter) Flat Single or multiple Yes for interzone Route repair No

Table 3.6: Comparison of MANET Routing Protocols

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3.MANETRoutingProtocols

Protocol Stored Information Update Period Update Information Update Destination Method

LSR Entire topology Hybrid Neighbours’ link state All nodes Flooding

DVR Distance-vector Periodical Distance vector Neighbours Broadcast

AODV Next hop for desired destination . Event-driven Route Error packet Source Unicast

AODV-BR Next hop, number of hops, destination Event-driven Route Error packet Source Unicast

AODVM Source Id, Next hop, last hop, hop count Event-driven Route Discovery Error message Source Unicast AOMDV Next hop, last hop, hop count for desired dest Event-driven Route Error packet Source Unicast CGSR Cluster member table, Distance Vector Periodical Clus. member tab., Distance Vec. Neigh.&Clus. head Broadcast

DDR Preferred neighb., neighboring zones inform. Periodical Id numbers & degree of neighb. Neighbours Broadcast

DMPSR Full path (From source to Destination) Event-driven Route Error packet Source Unicast

DREAM Location information of all other nodes Periodical geographical coordinates All nodes Broadcast

DSDV Distance vector Hybrid Distance vector Neighbours Broadcast

DSR Full path (From source to Destination) Event-driven Route Error packet Source Unicast

DST Distance/routing/query tables Event-driven Routing table Neighbours Broadcast

FSR Entire topology Periodicals(dif. freq.) Link state of fisheye scope Neighbours Broadcast

GSR Entire topology Periodical All nodes link state Neighbours Broadcast

MDSDV First and second hop, number of hops, destination Period./Event-driven Distance vector Neighbours Broadcast

NDMR Full path (From source to Destination) Event-driven Route Error packet Source Unicast

OLSR Neighbour, Topology, Routing tables Periodical partial link state information All nodes Flooding SHARP The height information of all neighbours Periodical Neighbours’ heights Neighbours Broadcast SMORT Next hop, number of hops, life time, full path Event-driven Route Error packet all source nodes Unicast

SMR Full path (From source to Destination) Event-driven Route Error packet Source Unicast

TBRPF Neighbour/Topology/Routing table Event-driven Link state Neighbours Broadcast

TORA The height information of all neighbours Event-driven Node’s height Neighbours Broadcast

WRP Distance/routing/link-cost tables, MRL Hybrid Distance Vector, List of responses Neighbours Broadcast

ZHLS Local/zone topology Period./Event-driven Node/Zone link state Zone/all nodes Broadcast

ZRP Local (within zone), topology Periodical Link state of nodes in the zone Neighbours Broadcast Table 3.7: Comparison of MANET Routing Protocols (cont.)

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Chapter 4

Preliminary Design of MDSDV