Enhancing Scalability in Wireless Networks

Wireless communication between mobile users is becoming more popular these days due to advances in hardware and software techniques like mobile computers and wireless data communication devices such as wireless modems and wireless LANs.Infrastructure independence of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks gives them an edge over the cellular networks. Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is still under development.Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) is one of the most important protocols for MANET because of its relatively low overhead & route convergence property. As AODV being the most successful MANET routing protocol, it has been further enhanced by many researchers by working on its different aspects. This work focuses on one important parameter of routing protocols i.e. 'Routing Overhead', which directly affects Energy Efficiency & Scalability of networks. Two of the AODV processes, Route Discovery and Hello load adds the most to routing overhead of AODV. Enhanced AODV (EAODV) performs better in terms of routing overhead, hello load end to end delay than classic AODV. The simulation is done through Network Simulator-2 (NS-2) from Berkeley.