Effects of Unstable Links on AODV Performance in Real Testbeds

A link between a pair of nodes is defined unstable if it is characterized by a packet loss which is not negligible in one or both directions. The presence of unstable links in multihop ad hoc networks is very likely and it depends on several factors (e.g., different transmission capabilities of the devices, interferences caused by additional wireless devices). Their management by the routing protocols is of paramount importance since they negatively affect applications performance. In our previous experimental studies, we found that AODV is characterized by very low performance in some specific situations and, in this work, we demonstrate that it mainly depends on the wrong management of unstable links as valid routes. We present some policies that have been proposed in literature to avoid this problem, and we validate two of them through experimental results, exploiting also a direct comparison with the proactive routing protocol OLSR. Our results show that AODV is not able to avoid the use of unstable links, even when an alternative stable route exists. In the same conditions, OLSR outperforms AODV by correctly managing unstable links. In fact, it is able to guarantee a higher packet delivery ratio to the application by using the most stable path to reach the destination.