Transmission Range Effects on AODV Multicast Communication

As laptop computers begin to dominate the marketplace, wireless adapters with varying bandwidth and range capabilities are being developed by hardware vendors. To provide multihop communication between these computers, ad hoc mobile networking is receiving increasing research interest. While increasing a node's transmission range allows fewer hops between a source and destination and enhances overall network connectivity, it also increases the probability of collisions and reduces the effective bandwidth seen at individual nodes. To enable formation of multihop ad hoc networks, a routing protocol is needed to provide the communication and route finding capability in these networks. The Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing protocol (AODV) has been designed to provide both unicast and multicast communication in ad hoc mobile networks. Because AODV uses broadcast to transmit multicast data packets between nodes, the transmission range plays a key role in determining the performance of AODV. This paper studies the effects of transmission range on AODV's multicast performance by examining the results achieved at varying transmission ranges and network configurations.