Effect of NTT on Performance of AODV in a Linear AD HOC Network

Wireless Ad Hoc Networks (WANETs) are predicted to be prevalent networks in coming future because of their infrastructure-less characteristics that result in self-organization, self-healing, and self-configuration of such networks. Routing means the process of selecting a path along which data can be transferred from source to destination that plays a significant role in the performance of ad hoc networks. There are many routing protocols developed for wireless ad hoc networks. One of such protocols, developed by C. E. Perkins, is Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol, which is a reactive routing protocol, AODV is used to establish route(s) between source node(s) and destination node(s) as and when routes are required. Performance of AODV routing protocol depends heavily on choice of values of a set of predefined attributes. One of such attributes of AODV is Node Traversal Time (NTT) which is supposed to play significant role in establishing route(s) between source node(s) and destination node(s). In this paper, we have investigated the performance of AODV in a linear wireless ad hoc network using different values of NTT using as well as without using Hello messages. The performance of the network has been measured using several metrics like Route Error Overhead, Routing Overhead, Normalized Routing Load, Average Hop Count, Total Number of Received Data Packets, Packet Delivery Ratio, Average End-to-End Delay and Throughput. It is observed that choice of value of NTT has a significant effect on establishment of route(s) between source node(s) and destination node(s) that eventually affects the performance of the linear wireless ad hoc network under consideration. The insights gained through this work could be useful in analysis of more realistic and complex networks.