Subject: RE: qantitative comparision for ad hoc routing protocols

From: Phillip Neumiller <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 19:36:44 -0500

Hello He,

>Do you know who did a wide range of quantitative comprisions
>for the proposed ad hoc routing protocols such as DSR, DSDR,
>AODV, ZRP, OLSR, CBRP, TORA?

At every IETF MANET meeting (I can remember) there has always been
a quantitative comparison of one versus the other usually by the 
authors of one versus the other.  Each seems to continue to improve
to keep up with each other in the two broad categories of reactive
and proactive and within each of these categories too.  Some of
these studies are probably biased and some probably aren't.  It
seems that without "real deployment" experience, what the really
important metrics are, has not been identified yet (IMHO).

Obviously questions like:

How does my routing algorithm scale?
Does my algorithm put restricitions on the MAC technology used?
What is the convergence time given some propagation/mobility and
traffic model?

are important, but (aka "How to Lie with Statistics"), since each
of these models are stochastic in nature you get into this sort of
exponential power of stochastic models working against the amount
of complexity the human mind can handle (never mind that all approaches
are a heuristic solution to an NP-complete problem!).  It may
be awhile before ad hoc routing theory has canonical answers.  The
best we can hope for now IMHO, is to hope for Moore's law to
continues to be superceded and we can continue to toss transistors
at the problem!

-pdn
****************************************************************************
This e-mail is intended only for the addressee named above and may contain
confidential, proprietary or privileged information. If you are not the
named addressee or the person responsible for delivering the message to the
named addressee, please inform us promptly by reply e-mail, then delete the
e-mail and destroy any printed copy. The contents should not be disclosed to
anyone and no copies should be made. We take reasonable precautions to
ensure that our emails are virus free. However we accept no responsibility
for any virus transmitted by us and recommend that you subject any incoming
e-mail to your own virus checking procedures.