Towards a Better Approach for Link Breaks Detection and Route Repairs Strategy in AODV Protocol

This paper describes a parameterized approach to the Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol using a network-simulator 2 (ns2). By utilizing two AODV's protocol functions, which are HELLO messages and local route repair, we explore the more flexible approach on these two important functions, rather than a fixed setting within the default AODV protocol. HELLO message is used to detect the broken link, while the local route repair in AODV is used to fix and discover alternative routes in the event of route failure. In this paper, two functions to optimize AODV performance have been utilized. The first is link break detection time (L-lb), using the HELLO message to detect link failure, and the second is link break position parameter (L-bp) for AODV's local route repair. The results show that the default AODV setting does not yield the best results for most defined network scenarios. In some cases, improvement compared to the default setting can be as high as 38%, for local route repair strategies. This paper presents a potential flexible and parameterized approach for dealing with link breaks and route repairing strategies for AODV protocol.