Abbreviated Dynamic Source Routing: Source Routing with Not-Unique Network Identifiers

Current ad-hoc network protocols are designed for hosts similar to those used in fixed networks. Those protocols are not adequate for some applications of ad-hoc networks, where used resources are very scarce. One example is the size of the network addresses, which may be a critical issue, specially with the use of IPv6 in DSR. This is due to the fact that this protocol uses source routing, so each datagram must carry the addresses of all the machines in its path. In this paper a new protocol named ADSR is proposed to solve this problem. This new protocol is a modified version of DSR based on using abbreviated addresses. The abbreviation procedure can lead to two different nodes having the same address, what we will named ’collision’. ADSR does not avoid but allow collisions, which is analyzed in this paper. Some results about this new protocol performance are shown. This results have been obtained by simulations implemented in ns-2 network simulator.