A Revised AODV Protocol with QoS for Mobile Ad hoc Network
Yu Ping
Department of Electronic and Communication
Engineering
North China Electric Power University
Baoding, Hebei, China
e-mail: yuping63119@yahoo.com.cn
Abstract—Because of high mobility and resource constrains in
Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) environment, a lot of
challenges are encountered in effective routing such as Quality
of Service (QoS). In this paper, the Ad hoc On-demand
Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol is revised by
calculating the corresponding QoS provision values to find the
best routes and applying the mechanism of carrier sense in
IEEE 802.11b to obtain the available bandwidth. Simulation
showed that using QoS parameters in route discovery process
can significantly reduce end-to-end delay and increase packet
delivery ratio under conditions of high load and moderate to
high mobility, though the routing load of AODV is slightly less
than that of the proposed protocol. Comparison between
original routing protocol and the improved algorithm is
carried out by using NS-2.
Keywords-QoS; AODV; available bandwidth; NS-2
I. INTRODUCTION
A Mobile Ad Hoc Network [1] is a collection of wireless
mobile nodes self-configured to form a network without any
established infrastructure. When a source node intends to
send packets to a destination node that is not within the
transmission range, the packets must be forwarded relying on
neighboring nodes. The neighbors then forward the packets
to the destination in a multi-hop manner.
One drawback of conventional AODV [2] is the absence
of the QoS [3] provision that make routing protocols which
requiring applications of QoS lower efficiency. In fact, we
can revise the conventional AODV routing protocol, for
example, adding the corresponding QoS information to each
node in its routing table. when a path discovery process is
initiated, calculating the corresponding QoS provision values
and finally we can find path with the best QoS provision. In
this paper, we present extensions to the well known AODV
routing protocol with the aim to discover and exploit routes
with bandwidth and delay provisions in Wireless Mesh
Networks.
In this paper, we propose a new protocol that modifies
AODV to improve its performance. With a simple
modification in applying the mechanism of carrier sense in
IEEE 802.11b, our proposed routing protocols can achieve
better packet delivery ratio, normalized routing load, and
end-to-end delay.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
briefly describes the routing operations of AODV. Section
III details our proposed methods. Section IV presents
_____________________________
978-1-4244-4520-2/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE
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Wang Ying
Department of Electronic and Communication
Engineering
North China Electric Power University
Baoding, Hebei, China
e-mail: ppgrape@163.com
simulations comparing our protocol with the conventional
AODV. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section V.
II. AODV ROUTING PROTOCOL
AODV [2] is one of the most popular routing protocols in
MANET. When a source node wants to send a message to
the destination node but it does not have a valid route yet, a
path discovery process will be initiated to locate the
destination. The source node broadcasts a route request
(RREQ) packet to its neighbors which then forward the
RREQ to their neighbors in turn. The forwarding process
continues until either the destination or an intermediate node
that has a route to the destination is located. When an RREQ
reaches the destination, the destination node responds by
unicasting an RREP (route reply) back along the reverse path.
As the RREP routes back to the source node, the route from
the source node to the destination is established.
Route maintenance is done by using RERR (route error)
packet. When a link failure is detected (by a link layer
feedback or the absence of several Hello messages), a RERR
packet is sent to all sources using the failed link in routing
table. Those routes are erased by the RERR packet along its
way. When a traffic source receives a RERR packet, it
initiates a new route discovery process if the route is still
needed.
III. PROPOSED METHODS
The MANET [4] commonly uses QoS [5] parameters
including delay, loss, bandwidth and so on, and in this paper,
we will take bandwidth and delay into consideration.
A. Calculation of the Available Bandwidth
The idle time which decided by the node and the
neighbor nodes' throughput comprehensively is a very
important parameter for the calculation of bandwidth,
during this period of time the node can successfully transmit
data. Therefore, idle time which reflects the available
bandwidth of nodes can be calculated by the following
formula (1):
B( I ) × Tidle
Bavailable ( I ) = (1)
Tint erval
Based on the above numerical formula, the main
difficulty of measuring the available bandwidth Bavailable (I)
lies in calculating the Tidle which stands for interval time

Tinterval during the channel idle time. We will set Tinterval 2
seconds, the value should not reflect changes in available
bandwidth if it is too large, and it will add too much
overhead if the setting is too small. Then the available
bandwidth in the recent Tinterval which can be calculated
through statistical Tidle during Tinterval.
The mechanism of carrier sense in IEEE 802.11b
protocol can be used to determine the channel idle or busy.
Carrier sense is divided into two ways: physical and virtual,
the physical layer provides the physical carrier sense
mechanism and the MAC layer provides virtual carrier
sense mechanism. Any way determine the media busy, the
media will be considered in a busy state. During the unit
interval, the period of time that from the channel in busy to
idle is the required Tbusy. Tidle can be expressed as (2).Put the
calculated Tidle into the formula (2) can easily obtain Bavailable
(I).
Tidle = Tint erval − Tbusy
Whenever the statistical available bandwidth in unit
interval is obtained tell network layer this news. In order to
make this statistical information no major fluctuations, using
a length of 5 sliding window: as soon as a new statistical
parameter come to the window all the 5 previous value in it
move forward and as a result the first statistical information
out of the queue. In this way, we will always keep the late
five measuring results in the window. Adopting the
smoothing technology, we will get the current local time
information via adding up different weights to the five
measuring value, using the formula (3) may find the current
available bandwidth. The weights from [0] to [4] are 10%,
10%, 10%, 20% and 50%.
4
B= ∑ (weight[i] × T
i =0
) × B(i)
idle [i ]
B. Calculation of the End-to-end Delay
The end-to-end delay is forecast via obtaining some
parameters from the MAC layer. For example, considering
the delay of date packet p via a path ri=n0,n1,n2,…nm (m≥2)
from n0 to nm. For the node ni take packet receiving speed ui,
packet sending speed ŋi and packet queue length li into
consideration. Received by the node ni, the packet will stay
in the queue till it is sent, the time this process cost is called
the delay in the ni, the packet from ni to nj is called
transmitting delay . So the delay can be obtained from the
following formulas (4) (5) (6):
l + d 0i −1 × (η i − μ i )
di = i , i=1,…,m (4)
ηi
li
di = , i=0
ηi
i −1
d 0i −1 = ∑d
j =0
j (6)

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C. Steps
When a node needs a new route to a destination, it
initiates a route discovery process.
• The source node first calculate the needed bandwidth
and examine the links between itself and neighbor
nodes. If there are enough available bandwidth, the
source node generates a RREQ packet, and sets up a
routing table for this date packet and broadcast the
RREQ packet.
• An intermediate node receiving a RREQ examines
the links between itself and neighbor nodes, the
RREQ packet is rebroadcast and a reverse path to the
source node is set up if there are enough available
bandwidth till the destination receives the RREQ
packet.
• When there are more than one nodes meet the need
of bandwidth, the source node will choose the best
(2) path basing on the delay.
• When the destination receives a RREQ it generates a
RREP. The RREP is routed back to the source node
via the reverse path established previously. As the
RREP travels towards the source, a forward path to
the destination is established. Then the source node
sends a packet to reserve the bandwidth, ensuring
that the resources are not used by other applications.
IV. SIMULATION FOR QAODV
The NS-2 network simulator was used to create a
simulation environment to analyze the proposed protocol
(qAODV) and compare it with the conventional AODV
routing protocol.
A. Traffic and Mobility Models
(3)
The network used for simulations consists of 30 mobility
nodes. Traffic sources in our simulations are CBR
(continuous bit rate). The packet size is set to 512 byte and
the sending rate is set to 1 packet per second. Each
simulation is run for 200 simulated seconds. The mobility
model uses the random way point model in a rectangular
1000×1000 field. Each node starts its journey from a random
location to a random destination with a randomly chosen
speed (uniformly distributed between 1-20 m/sec).
Simulations are carried out by varying the number of
connections and the velocity. While varying the number of
data connections the number of connections is varied from
10 to 60 nodes, velocity is kept at a uniform rate of 0-20 m/s.
B. Performance Metrics
The following metrics are used in varying scenarios to
evaluate the different protocols:
1)Packet Delivery RatioThis is defined as the ratio of
the number of data packets received by the destinations to
those sent by the CBR sources [6].
(5)
2)Normalized Routing Load  This is defined as the
number of routing packets transmitted per data packet
delivered at the destination. Normalized routing load gives a
measure of the efficiency of the protocol
 3)End-to-end Delay of Ddata PacketsThis is defined
as the delay between the time at which the data packet was
originated at the source and the time it reaches the
destination. Data packets that get lost en route are not
considered. Delays due to route discovery, queuing and
retransmissions are included in the delay metric.
C. Varying Velocity
Figure 1. Delay vs.Velocity.
Figure 2. Packet Delivery Ratio vs.Velocity.
Figure 3. Normalized Routing Load vs.Velocity.
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As the velocity increases, the overall trend of end-to-end
delay also increased, but the qAODV protocol slows the
increase in delay, in comparison with AODV, it has lower
end-to-end delay. This is because the qAODV supporting the
delay requirements which filter out some links that can not
stabilize the business, reducing overall network transmission
delay, as shown in Figure 1.
Because of bandwidth and delay we added to route
request packet the packet delivery ratio significantly
improved, as shown in Figure 2, it then stabilizes and
becomes better than AODV with the increase in the velocity.
The route request packet of the qAODV protocol adds
bandwidth and delay constraints to the original package
reflecting QoS requirements in the source node. In the RREP
packet, the same bandwidth and delay are added to indicate
the actual available bandwidth and delay at the same time.
Although we have adjusted the send frequency of hello
packet, qAODV have the higher routing load than AODV as
shown in Figure 3.
D. Varying Number of Connections
Figure 4. Packet Delivery Ratio vs. Number of Connections.
Figure 4 shows the effect of connections on the packet
delivery ratio. The packet delivery ratio of AODV decreases
as the number of connections increases. When the network
connections increase to a certain number (set by our network
environment 50), the packet delivery ratio decline
accelerated. The qAODV has higher delivery ratio than
AODV because of the bandwidth and delay constraints in
qAODV packet, reflecting the superiority of the qAODV
protocol.


Figure 5. Delay vs. Number of Connections.
As can be seen from figure 5, delay of AODV and
qAODV remains approximately equal when the network
topology is easy to connect a few small cases. The average
end-to-end delay in AODV increases with the number of
nodes and connections. The qAODV protocol added with
delay constraints has reduced the overall end-to-end delay.
Figure 6. Normalized Routing Load vs. Number of Connections.
As the qAODV protocol increase bandwidth and delay
constraints, the control message during choosing the path has
increased, So routing load is higher than AODV protocol. As
the number of network connections increase, however, the
increase of qAODV protocol routing load is relatively stable,
slightly higher than the AODV protocol.
It is evident from the results that qAODV improves the
performance of AODV. Under most conditions, qAODV has
a higher packet delivery ratio and lower delay than AODV.
Though the routing load of AODV is slightly less than that

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of qAODV, the increase in routing load is also an
appropriate framework.
V. CONCLUSION
This paper proposes a new protocol that modifies AODV
to improve its performance. The bandwidth and delay are
jointly considered as the route selection criteria in this article.
The simulation results show qAODV has improved the
performance of ad hoc network than conventional AODV
routing protocols. Under most conditions, qAODV has a
higher packet delivery ratio and lower delay than AODV,
though the routing load of AODV is slightly less than that of
qAODV, the in-crease in routing load is also an appropriate
framework.
The proposed protocol qAODV can be used either as an
alternative to AODV or as an optimization under moderate to
high load scenarios. It could also be suitable if application
oriented metrics such as delay and packet delivery ratio are
important for the ad hoc network application
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