BRICS: A building-block approach for analyzing routing protocols in ad hoc networks - a case study of reactive routing protocols

One of the main challenges in ad hoc networks research is understanding the effect of mobility on the performance of routing protocols. In a previous study, we have shown Why mobility affects the performance of routing protocols. In this study, we further extend our approach to analyze the interplay between mobility and the protocol mechanistic building blocks. Through this approach we hope to explain How performance varies with mobility by decomposing the protocol into parameterized mechanistic building blocks based on their functionalities. Then, we apply this approach to reactive MANET routing protocols like AODV and DSR, which enables us to build a common building block architecture that encompasses these reactive protocols. The effect of mobility on each building block is evaluated. We are specifically interested in understanding the contribution of each building block to the overall protocol performance. Through simulations, several lessons on protocol design are learnt. For example, in both AODV and DSR, flooding and caching seem to have a great effect on performance, while salvaging in DSR barely seems to have an effect on the protocol performance.