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Dynamic Source Routing

The Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol is a source-routed on-demand protocol [1]. There are two major phases for the protocol: route discovery and route maintenance. The key difference between DSR and other protocols is the routing information is contained in the packet header. Since the routing information is contained in the packet header then the intermediate nodes do not need to maintain routing information. An intermediate node may wish to record the routing information in its tables to improve performance but it is not mandatory. Another feature of DSR is that it supports asymmetric links as a route reply can be piggybacked onto a new route request packet. DSR is suited for small to medium sized networks as its overhead can scale all the way down to zero. The overhead will increase significantly for networks with larger hop diameters as more routing information will be contained in the packet headers.



2001-07-02