Congestion Control Performance of R-DSDV Protocol in Multihop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc wireless networks are composed of mobile nodes communicating through wireless links, without any fixed backbone infrastructure. Frequent topology changes due to node mobility make routing in such dynamic networks a challenging problem. Moreover, successful message routing implies every mobile node is potentially capable of acting as a router, thus supporting store-and-forward mechanisms. However, resource limitations on these nodes also require a control on congestion due to message forwarding. In this paper, we consider our recently proposed randomized version of the well-known Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) routing protocol, referred to as R-DSDV, and validate its performance through extensive simulation experiments. Our results demonstrate that a probabilistic control on message traffic based on local tuning of protocol parameters is feasible, and that R-DSDV outperforms the basic DSDV protocol by significantly reducing the average queue size associated with each mobile node and hence the average packet delay.