Multihop Wireless Networks: Opportunistic Routing

Series Page

Wiley Series on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing

Series Editors: Dr Xuemin (Sherman) Shen, University of Waterloo, Canada

Dr Yi Pan, Georgia State University, USA

The Wiley Series on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing is a series of comprehensive, practical and timely books on wireless communication and network systems. The series focuses on topics ranging from wireless communication and coding theory to wireless applications and pervasive computing. The books provide engineers and other technical professionals, researchers, educators, and advanced students in these fields with invaluable insight into the latest developments and cutting-edge research.

Other titles in the series:

Misic and Misic, Wireless Personal Area Networks: Performance, Interconnection, and Security with IEEE 802.15.4, January 2008, 978-0-470-51847-2

Takagi and Walke, Spectrum Requirement Planning in Wireless Communications: Model and Methodology for IMT-Advanced, April 2008, 978-0-470-98647-9

Pérez-Fontán and Espiñeira, Modeling the Wireless Propagation Channel: A simulation approach with MATLAB®, August 2008, 978-0-470-72785-0

Ippolito, Satellite Communications Systems Engineering: Atmospheric Effects, Satellite Link Design and System Performance, August 2008, 978-0-470-72527-6

Lin and Sou, Charging for Mobile All-IP Telecommunications, September 2008, 978-0-470-77565-3

Myung and Goodman, Single Carrier FDMA: A New Air Interface for Long Term Evolution, October 2008, 978-0-470-72449-1

Wang, Kondi, Luthra and Ci, 4G Wireless Video Communications, April 2009, 978-0-470-77307-9

Cai, Shen and Mark, Multimedia Services in Wireless Internet: Modeling and Analysis, June 2009, 978-0-470-77065-8

Stojmenovic, Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks: Algorithms and Protocols for Scalable Coordination and Data Communication, February 2010, 978-0-470-17082-3

Liu and Weiss, Wideband Beamforming: Concepts and Techniques, March 2010, 978-0-470-71392-1

Riccharia and Westbrook, Satellite Systems for Personal Applications: Concepts and Technology, July 2010, 978-0-470-71428-7

Qian, Muller and Chen, Security in Wireless Networks and Systems, February 2013, 978-0-470-512128

This edition first published 2011

© 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Registered office

John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom.

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com.

The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zeng, Kai.

Multihop wireless networks : opportunistic routing / Kai Zeng, Wenjing Lou, Ming Li.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-66617-3 (hardback)

1. Ad hoc networks (Computer networks) 2. Radio relay systems. I. Lou, Wenjing. II. Li, Ming, 1985- III. Title.

TK5105.77.Z46 2011

621.387'82–22

2011007718

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Print ISBN: 978-0-470-66617-3

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-119-97361-4

oBook ISBN: 978-1-119-97360-7

ePub ISBN: 978-1-119-97429-1

eMobi ISBN: 978-1-119-97430-7

About the Series Editors

Xuemin (Sherman) Shen (M'97-SM'02) received his B.Sc degree in electrical engineering from Dalian Maritime University, China in 1982, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees (both in electrical engineering) from Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, in 1987 and 1990 respectively. He is a Professor and University Research Chair, and the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada. His research focuses on mobility and resource management in interconnected wireless/wired networks, UWB wireless communications systems, wireless security, and ad hoc and sensor networks. He is a co-author of three books, and has published more than 300 papers and book chapters in wireless communications and networks, control and filtering. Dr. Shen serves as a founding area editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications; Editor-in-Chief for Peer-to-Peer Networking and Application; Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology; KICS/IEEE Journal of Communications and Networks, Computer Networks; ACM/Wireless Networks; and Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (Wiley), etc. He has also served as Guest Editor for IEEE JSAC, IEEE Wireless Communications, and IEEE Communications Magazine. Dr. Shen received the Excellent Graduate Supervision Award in 2006, and the Outstanding Performance Award in 2004 from the University of Waterloo, the Premier's Research Excellence Award (PREA) in 2003 from the Province of Ontario, Canada, and the Distinguished Performance Award in 2002 from the Faculty of Engineering, University of Waterloo. Dr. Shen is a registered Professional Engineer of Ontario, Canada.

Dr. Yi Pan is the Chair and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgia State University, USA. Dr. Pan received his B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees in computer engineering from Tsinghua University, China, in 1982 and 1984, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh, USA, in 1991. Dr. Pan's research interests include parallel and distributed computing, optical networks, wireless networks, and bioinformatics. Dr. Pan has published more than 100 journal papers with over 30 papers published in various IEEE journals. In addition, he has published over 130 papers in refereed conferences (including IPDPS, ICPP, ICDCS, INFOCOM, and GLOBECOM). He has also co-edited over 30 books. Dr. Pan has served as an editor-in-chief or an editorial board member for 15 journals including five IEEE Transactions and has organized many international conferences and workshops. Dr. Pan has delivered over 10 keynote speeches at many international conferences. Dr. Pan is an IEEE Distinguished Speaker (2000–2), a Yamacraw Distinguished Speaker (2002), and a Shell Oil Colloquium Speaker (2002). He is listed in Men of Achievement, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in American Education, Who's Who in Computational Science and Engineering, and Who's Who of Asian Americans.

Preface

Advances in communication and networking technologies are rapidly making ubiquitous network connectivity a reality. Wireless networks are indispensable for supporting such access anywhere and at any time. Among various types of wireless networks, multihop wireless networks (MWNs) have been attracting increasing attention for decades due to its broad civilian and military applications. Basically, a MWN is a network of nodes connected by wireless communication links. Due to the limited transmission range of the radio, many pairs of nodes in MWNs may not be able to communicate directly, hence they need other intermediate nodes to forward packets for them. Routing in such networks is an important issue and it poses great challenges.

On the one hand, due to its open-air nature, the wireless environment presents great challenges when attempting to ensure good routing performance. The wireless channel is unreliable due to fading and interference, which makes it hard to maintain a quality path between a source and a destination. A node's mobility also incurs frequent topology changes, which bring significant overheads on maintaining and recalculating paths. Furthermore, mobile devices and sensors are usually constrained by battery capacity and communication and computation capability, which imposes limitations on the functionality of routing protocols. On the other hand, the wireless medium possesses inherent unique characteristics, which can be exploited to enhance transmission reliability and routing performance. Opportunistic routing (OR) is one promising technique that takes advantages of the spacial diversity and broadcast nature of the wireless medium to improve the packet-forwarding reliability in multihop wireless networks. It combats the unreliable wireless links by involving multiple neighboring nodes (forwarding candidates) for packet relay. This book studies the properties, energy efficiency, capacity, throughput, protocol design and security issues related to OR in multihop wireless networks.

This book is intended for networking professionals working in wireless networks and communications, who are familiar with the fundamentals of networking and wireless communications. It may also be used as a supplement to graduate courses in wireless networking, mobile computing, and wireless communications.

The contents of each chapter are described as follows.

Chapter 1 presents the case for opportunistic routing and related work. We first introduce the background of multihop wireless networks (mesh networks, sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks, vehicular networks, etc.). Next, we discuss general wireless multihop routing, including traditional routing (AODV, DSR, etc.), geographic routing, context-based routing and opportunistic routing. We will discuss the motivation of these routing techniques, how they evolved, and their advantages and disadvantages. We will then discuss related opportunistic and collaborative techniques, including cooperative communication, opportunistic scheduling, network coding and multiple access point (AP) collaboration. We will also introduce related issues about opportunistic routing, including capacity studies of multihop wireless networks, multirate routing, energy-efficient routing, and link quality measurement, etc.

Chapter 2 of this book presents the principles and properties of the local behaviors of opportunistic routing (including geographic and link state based opportunistic routing). We will demonstrate how the performance gain changes according to the selection, prioritization, and coordination of forwarding candidates in opportunistic routing. We will discuss in what scenario or situation, opportunistic routing will work or make sense. We will also present two polynomial algorithms to compute least cost opportunistic routing paths (anypath), and introduce properties of least cost anypath.

Chapter 3 of this book studies the energy efficiency of geographic opportunistic routing (GOR). First, we motivate the energy efficiency issues of opportunistic routing in the context of sensor networks. Next, we propose a metric, Expected Packet Advancement (EPA) per unit energy consumption, in order to balance the packet advancement, reliability and energy consumption of GOR. By leveraging the proved principles in Chapter 2, we then propose two efficient algorithms that select a feasible candidate set that maximizes this local metric. We validate our analysis results by simulations and justify the effectiveness of the new metric by comparing the performance of our GOR with those of the existing geographic and opportunistic routing schemes.

Chapter 4 of this book analyzes the throughput bound and capacity of opportunistic routing given the routing strategy, i.e. the forwarding candidates of each node and the corresponding relay priority. We will first give a brief introduction on computing end-to-end throughput of traditional routing and explain why the corresponding methodology cannot directly apply to opportunistic routing, which motivates the proposed framework and methodology. The maximum end-to-end throughput problem is formulated as a maximum-flow linear programming (LP) problem subject to the constraints of forwarding candidate set conflicts. The methodology establishes a theoretical foundation for the evaluation of the performance limits of variants of opportunistic routing protocols and strategies.

Chapter 5 extends the framework proposed in Chapter 4 to deal with dynamic opportunistic routing strategies and multi-radio, multi-channel scenario. An LP approach and a heuristic algorithm is proposed to obtain an opportunistic forwarding strategy scheduling that satisfies a traffic demand vector for a hyperlink, which contains all the outgoing links from a transmitter to all its forwarding candidates.

Chapter 6 of the book investigates the state-of-the-art of the candidate coordination schemes of opportunistic routing at the medium access control layer. These schemes include GeRaF collision avoidance MAC, contention-based forwarding, ExOR batch-based MAC, slotted acknowledgment (ACK), and compressed slotted ACK. A new scheme, called fast slotted acknowledgment (FSA), is described in detail. The scheme adopts a single ACK to confirm the successful reception and suppress other candidates' attempts to forward the data packet with the help of a channel-sensing technique.

Chapter 7 shows how network coding can help ease the candidate coordination in opportunistic routing. It will include an introduction on network coding, how it can help ease the candidate coordination, and on integrating opportunistic routing/broadcast with network coding. A classical work integrating opportunistic routing and network coding, MORE, will be introduced. Recent advancements on integrating symbol-level network coding and opportunistic routing in wireless broadcast are introduced.

Chapter 8 of this book studies the impacts of multirate, candidate selection, prioritization, and coordination on the throughput of GOR under a contention-based medium-access scenario. It will also introduce distributed algorithms to compute the optimal path and transmission rate in multirate opportunistic routing.

Chapter 9 of the book discusses possible attacks on opportunistic routing and countermeasures. We analyze the security vulnerabilities of the existing link quality-measurement mechanisms, and their impacts on opportunistic routing and traditional routing. We present a broadcast-based secure link quality measurement mechanism that prevents a neighboring node from maliciously claiming a higher measurement result. The secure link quality measurement helps to secure the link-state-based opportunistic routing and traditional routing.

Chapter 10 studies the opportunistic broadcast in vehicular networks. Traditional connected dominant set-based broadcast or multi-point relay-based broadcast both suffer from unreliable wireless links in the similar way as that in traditional unicast routing. The broadcast performance can also be improved by introducing the concept of opportunistic forwarding.

Chapter 11 presents the conclusion of this book and discusses some future research topics related to opportunistic routing.

List of Abbreviations

Chapter 1

Introduction

This chapter presents the case for opportunistic routing and related work. We will first introduce the background of multihop wireless networks (mesh networks, sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks, vehicular ad hoc networks, etc.). We then point out the routing challenges in multihop wireless networks. Secondly, we discuss general wireless multihop routing, including traditional routing (AODV, DSR, etc.), geographic routing, context-based routing and opportunistic routing. We will discuss the motivation of these routing techniques, how they evolved, and their advantages and disadvantages. We will then discuss related opportunistic and collaborative techniques, including cooperative communication, opportunistic scheduling, network coding, multiple AP collaboration, etc. This will help to put opportunistic routing in perspective. We will also introduce related issues about opportunistic routing, including capacity studies of multihop wireless networks, multirate routing, energy-efficient routing, and link-quality measurement, etc.

1.1 Multihop Wireless Networks

A multihop wireless network (MWN) is a network of nodes (e.g. computers) connected by wireless communication links. The links are usually implemented with digital packet radios. Due to the limited transmission range of the radio, many pairs of nodes in MWNs may not be able to communicate directly; hence they may need other intermediate nodes to forward packets for them. Multihop wireless networks have broad military and civilian applications in many critical situations. They have received increasing attention in the past decade due to their broad applications and easy deployment at low cost without relying on existing infrastructure (Akyildiz and Kasimoglu 2004; Akyildiz et al. 2002, 2005; Cerpa et al. 2001; Chong and Kumar 2003; Estrin et al. 2002; Lorincz et al. 2004). Different names are used to refer to them in different scenarios.

Mobile ad hoc Networks (MANETs)

Generally speaking, a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self-configuring network of mobile devices connected by wireless links. Each device in a MANET is free to move independently in any direction. So the node-to-node connection and network topology will change frequently. The primary challenge in MANETs is continuously to maintain the routing information at each node required to properly route traffic. The applications of MANETs include search-and-rescue operations. Such scenarios are characterized by a lack of installed communications infrastructure because all the equipment might already be destroyed or the region could be too remote. MANETs can also provide communications between autonomous vehicles, aircraft and ground troops in the battlefield where a fixed communication infrastructure is always unavailable and infeasible.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs)

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) (Akyildiz et al. 2002) are another variant of MWNs. They are normally used to monitor various physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants. A large-scale WSN typically consists of hundreds or thousands of small and cheap sensor nodes with wireless communication capabilities. These sensor nodes may form local clusters, and reactively or periodically report the sensing results to one or multiple base stations via multihop routing. The sensors are usually powered by batteries with limited capacity. Energy efficiency is therefore the primary concern and key challenge in WSNs. The sensors are typically static but some more powerful sensor nodes may have mobile capability (Hu and Evans 2004).

Wireless-Mesh Networks (WMNs)

Wireless-mesh networks (WMN) (Akyildiz and Wang 2005) are another type of MWNs, and are usually used to provide the last mile wireless broadband Internet access for the civilian users. They can also support enterprise networking, healthcare and medical systems, and security surveillance systems. They consist of mesh routers and mesh clients, where mesh routers have minimal mobility and form the backbone of WMNs. The integration of WMNs with other networks such as the Internet, cellular networks, IEEE 802.11 WLAN, IEEE 802.15, IEEE 802.16, and sensor networks can be accomplished through the gateway and bridging functions in the mesh routers. Mesh clients can be either stationary or mobile, and can form a client mesh (multihop) network among themselves and with mesh routers. Network capacity in WMNs is an important issue. The capacity of WMNs is affected by many factors such as network topology, node density, traffic patterns, number of radios/channels used for each node, transmission power level, carrier sensing threshold, node mobility, and environment (indoor/outdoor), etc. A clear understanding of the relationship between network capacity and the above factors provides a guideline for protocol development, architecture design, deployment and operation of the network.

Vehicular ad hoc Networks (VANETs)

In VANETs, every vehicle communicates with other vehicles (V2V) and with roadside infrastructures (V2I) by means of wireless communication equipment. The most important usage of these networks is to inform other vehicles in emergency situations such as car accidents, urgent braking or traffic jams. In such cases, a vehicle can inform other vehicles by broadcasting safety messages before facing the event. VANETs are a cornerstone of the envisioned Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). They will contribute to safer and more efficient roads in the future by providing timely information to drivers and concerned authorities. VANETs are similar to MANETs, but the key difference lies in that in VANETs, vehicles move in an organized fashion rather than randomly. The vehicles are restricted in their range of motion and their mobility can be predicted in the short term, because their movement should obey certain traffic rules.

Compared with traditional single-hop wireless networks, such as cellular networks and local area networks, MWNs have several advantages: 1. coverage extension and connectivity improvement; 2. reducing energy consumption; transmission over multiple short-range wireless links might require less transmission energy than that required over long-range single-hop links; 3. cost efficiency: they avoid wide deployment of cables and can be deployed in a cost efficient way; 4. robustness: in MWNs, multiple paths might exist between a pair of communication nodes, which can be used to increase robustness of the network.

1.2 Routing Challenges in MWNs

The purpose of routing is generally to find a path or multiple paths from the source to the destination, maintain or update path(s) when the topology or link quality changes, and forward packets along the path(s). Routing protocol design in MWNs faces a great challenge mainly due to the following facts.

First, the wireless link is unreliable. The properties and quality of a wireless link may vary with the transmission power, transmission rate, distance and path loss between two nodes. Furthermore, channel fading (such as multipath fading and shadowing) results in fluctuations in the received signal strength and therefore intermittent link behavior. The difficulty in managing or controlling the link quality and reliability in wireless networks makes it very hard to find and maintain a good and stable path from the source to the destination.

Second, the wireless medium is broadcast in nature. Transmission on one link may interfere with the transmissions on the neighboring links. This broadcast medium contention brings fundamental constraints on the routing performance, such as throughput and delay. There is inevitable intra-path and inter-path contention due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. It is very challenging to achieve optimal routing performance even when there is a single flow, due to the complicate interdependence between the medium contention, route selection, and medium access control. When there are multiple flows (different source-destination pairs) in the network, optimizing overall routing performance becomes extremely hard.

Third, mobility is an inherent property and phenomenon in wireless networks. The node's mobility makes network topology change frequently, thus complicating the task of finding and maintaining a good path between the source and destination. Mobility also affects the link quality, which introduces further challenges in maintaining a timely good path.

Fourth, wireless-embedded devices, such as sensors and handheld devices, are typically battery powered. The lifetime of the battery imposes a limitation on the operation hours and connectivity of the network. Energy efficiency has been a critical concern in energy-constrained networks (e.g. wireless sensor networks). Finding paths that consume minimum energy to deliver the packets from the source to the destination is an important approach to save energy in wireless sensor networks, since the radio communication has been identified as the major source of energy consumption in such networks. However, finding minimum energy consumption path(s) is neither easy nor enough. It is hard mainly because of the unreliability of the wireless link, and it is not enough because we also have to achieve other performance goals, such as satisfying a delay constraint due to specific applications (e.g. surveillance). Choosing and maintaining path(s) that strike a good balance between energy consumption and performance is challenging, especially with the presence of unreliable wireless links.

A large body of research on routing protocols in MWNs has been motivated by the above challenges. Next, we will introduce the major routing protocols in the literature, and motivate the opportunistic routing.

1.3 Routing Techniques in MWNs

The routing protocols in MWNs can be classified into different categories using different criteria. For example, they can be classified into link-state routing (e.g. OLSR—Jacquet et al. 2001) and distance-vector routing (e.g. AODV—Perkins and Royer 2001). They can also be categorized as proactive (e.g. DSDV—Perkins and Bhagwat 1994) and reactive (on-demand) (e.g. DSR—Johnson et al. 2001—and TORA—Park and Corson 1997) routing. For a better understanding of the difference between opportunistic routing and other state-of-the-art routing protocols in MWNs, we would like to classify the routing protocols as traditional and opportunistic routing.

1.3.1 Traditional Routing

Traditional routing protocols (Johnson et al. 2001; Perkins and Bhagwat 2001; Perkins and Royer 2001) for multihop wireless networks have followed the concept of routing in wired networks by abstracting the wireless links as wired links, and finding the shortest, least cost, or highest throughput path(s) between a source and destination. Most routing protocols rely on the consistent and stable behavior of individual links, so the intermittent behavior of wireless links can result in poor performance such as low packet delivery ratio and high control overhead. On the other hand, this abstraction ignores the unique broadcast nature and spacial diversity of the wireless medium. We introduce several well known traditional routing protocols in MWNs as follows.

AODV

The Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol (Perkins and Royer 2001) is designed for routing in MANETs. It is called, on demand, because it builds routes between the source and destination nodes only when source nodes request it. It maintains and updates the route as long as it is needed by the source node. AODV uses sequence numbers to ensure the freshness of routes. It is loop-free, self-starting, and scales to large numbers of mobile nodes.

AODV establishes routes using a route request and route reply discovery cycle. When a source node requires a route to a destination for which it does not already have a route, it broadcasts a route request (RREQ) message throughout the network. The RREQ message contains the source node's IP address, current sequence number, a broadcast ID, and the most recent sequence number for the destination of which the source node is aware. Intermediate nodes that receive the RREQ update their information for the source node and set up backwards pointers to the source node in their routing tables. A node receiving the RREQ will unicast a route reply (RREP) message back to the source if it is either the destination or if it knows a route to the destination with corresponding sequence number no smaller than that contained in the RREQ. Otherwise, it rebroadcasts the RREQ. Nodes keep track of the RREQ's source IP address and broadcast ID, and discard the RREQ that they have received recently and do not forward it.

As the RREP message is relayed back to the source node along the reversing path, nodes on the path set up forward pointers to the destination. Once the source node receives the RREP, it may begin to forward data packets to the destination along the path. If the source later receives a RREP containing a greater sequence number or contains the same sequence number with a smaller hop count, it may update its routing information for that destination and begin using the new route. In this sense, AODV tries to find the shortest path with fewest hops.

The route is active and maintained as long as there are data packets routed through it. Once the source node stops sending the data packets, the links on the path will time out and eventually be deleted from the intermediate nodes' routing tables. If a link break occurs while the route is active, the upstream node of the break link propagates a route error (RERR) message to the source node to inform it of this broken link. After receiving the RERR, if the source node still desires a route, it will initiate a route discovery again.

The advantage of AODV lies in that due to its on-demand (reactive) nature, it can handle highly dynamic topology change in MANETs. However, it possesses several disadvantages. First, AODV lacks support for high throughput routing metrics. It is designed to support the shortest hop-count metric, thus favoring long and low-bandwidth links over short and high-bandwidth links. Second, it may incur long route discovery latency. AODV does not discover a route until a flow is initiated. This route-discovery latency can be high in large-scale networks. Third, it may introduce broadcast storm problems in bandwidth-limited MWNs. Each network node participates in the route discovery process by rebroadcasting RREQ messages, which leads to redundant rebroadcasts, contention and packet collision.

DSR

Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) (Johnson et al. 2001) is another well known on-demand routing protocol. It is similar to the AODV in that it forms a route on demand when a source node requests it. However, it uses source routing instead of relying on the routing table at each intermediate node.

In the route-discovery phase, like AODV, DSR uses RREQ and RREP messages. When the source node needs to send data packets to a destination and it does not know a route to it, it initiates a route discovery by broadcasting a RREQ message. The RREQ identifies the initiator (source) and target (destination) of the route discovery and contains a unique request ID. It also contains a record listing the address of each intermediate node through which this particular copy of RREQ has been forwarded. The route record is initialized to an empty list by the initiator.

When a node receives a RREQ, it checks if it is itself the target of this RREQ. If this is the case, the node returns a RREP, which contains the accumulated route record from the RREQ to the initiator. If it is not the case and it is the first time the node receives the RREQ, it appends its own address to the route record in the RREQ message and rebroadcast the RREQ. The node will drop the RREQ message if it is a duplicated one or when the node finds that its own address has already been in the route record.

When the source node receives a RREP message, it catches the route carried in the message and sends subsequent data packets to the destination along this route.

Dynamic source routing shares the same advantage as