Performance Study of an Overlay Approach to Active Routing in Ad Hoc Networks

We motivate the use of the active technology for routing in ad hoc networks.
We present an active architecture where passive and active nodes can operate together, avoiding any change in the legacy muti-hop routing protocol they use.
We detail a basic reactive protocol which can be used to build any overlay on top of an ad hoc network. We model it as an active application called Re-Active Routing (RAR).
RAR provides dynamic routing in dense and sparse active overlays. We investigate its performance in static and dynamic environments and show that it depends substantially on the active range, i.e. on the allowed maximal number of hops between two active nodes. For a well-chosen active range, RAR achieves good performance even if the mobility level is high and the overlay density is as low as 12.5 %.