Investigating the Scalability of the Fish-eye State Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

The overall goal of this paper is to investigate the scalability of the Fish-eye State Routing (FSR) protocol under different network scenarios in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). This performance based study simulates FSR under practical network scenarios typical of MANETs, and measures selected metrics that give an introspective look into the performance of FSR. The FSR protocol is compared against the minimum hop-count based reactive Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. The implementations of both protocols are simulated for varying conditions of network density, node mobility and traffic load. The following performance metrics are evaluated: packet delivery ratio, average hop count per path, control message overhead and energy consumed per node. Simulation results indicate FSR scales relatively better compared to DSR and consumes less energy when operated with moderate to longer link-state broadcast update time intervals in high density networks with moderate to high node mobility and offered traffic load. FSR successfully delivers packets for a majority of the time with relatively lower energy cost in comparison to DSR.