A Comparative Study between AODV & DSR Routing Protocols

There are two major routing classes in mobile ad-hoc networks, Reactive and pro-active routing but in literature another class of MANETs routing present that is Hybrid routing. This article discusses the two major protocols Ad-hoc On demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), both belong to the same class of routing protocol the Reactive Routing Protocol.

Both routing protocols have different literature, excremental or more secure protocols such as DSR protocol has SOOS, ARIDANE, CONFIDANT etc. Same as AODV has some improved and secure protocols like SAR, CORE, SAODV etc. Both routing protocols have almost same strategies for route construction phase and route maintenance phase. Majority of cases they have same security threat. The main advantages of reactive routing protocol are to reduce the overheads of permanent route maintenance. its only construct the route when the source node demands for a route. The major disadvantages of reactive routing protocols are that a latency is incurred before a destination is establish and second  the route that is actually computed might not be optimal. The DSR invented by Dave Johnson in 1994, as a part of the Monarch project at CMU. In DSR, as the name suggests it is source routing that is the source specifies the entire route in the packet header. The source routing method in which the sender of a packet establishes the complete sequence of nodes from beginning to end where the packet has to pass, the sender unambiguously list this route in the packet's header, spotting each forwarding "hop" by the address of the next node to which to broadcast the packet on its way to target host. The AODV builds on DSDV to reduce system wide broadcasts. Localize the effects of local movements; keep in mind DSDV local movements have global effects. AODV is basically a combination of both DSR and DSDV. It makes use of the basic on demand method of route discovery and route maintenance from DSR, in addition the use of hop by hop routing. AODV uses sequence number to eliminate old route and advocates the use of hello packets to keep track of neighbors these schemes comes from DSDV.

References:

[1] Mamoun Hussein Mamoun, "Important characteristic of diffrences between DSR & AODV routing protocol", Egypt.

[2]Kashif Laeeq, Khalid Khan, "Performance Study of Approaches for Detecting Attacks in Ad hoc Wireless Networks" Journal of Computing, Volume 3, Issue 2, Feb. 2011.