INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS Int. J. Commun. Syst. (2011) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/dac.1327 Performance comparison of end-to-end and on-the-spot traffic-aware techniques Raad S. Al-Qassas 1, * ,† and Mohamed Ould-Khaoua 2 1 Department of Computer Science, Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Amman, Jordan 2 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sultan Qaboos University, Muskat, Oman SUMMARY Traffic-aware routing protocols have recently received considerable attention. This has been motivated by the role that it could play in extending the network’s lifetime (or operational time) as it target the reservation of node’s power and better utilisation of channel bandwidth, which could lead to performance improve- ment in terms of important performance metrics including throughput and end-to-end delay. Traffic-aware techniques can be classified into two categories, namely end-to-end and on-the-spot, based on the way of establishing and maintaining routes between any source and destination. Although there has been much work on both categories, there has been no comparative performance study of the two approaches. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that carries out such a performance comparison. To this end, we have adapted our traffic-aware technique namely load density to suggest a new ‘on-the-spot’ traffic- aware technique. The main reason for doing this adaptation is to ensure that the comparison between the two approaches is fair and realistic. The study will reveal the main performance characteristics of the two approaches under various traffic and network conditions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 15 September 2009; Revised 18 April 2011; Accepted 28 June 2011 KEY WORDS: ad hoc; routing; traffic aware; load balancing; wireless networks 1. INTRODUCTION There has been much work on developing reactive routing algorithms for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) [1–3]. Most of these algorithms have considered finding the shortest path from source to destination to build a route. However, this can lead to some nodes being overloaded more than oth- ers in the network. Therefore, a traffic-aware technique to distribute the load is highly desirable in order to make a good and fair utilisation of nodes’ scarce resources. In addition, it is often useful to prevent the creation of congested areas in the network, resulting in improved network performance. Indeed, traffic-aware routing protocols have recently received considerable attention [4–9] as they could play a major role in increasing network lifetime as they target the reservation of nodes’ bat- tery and improve network performance as it better utilise the channel bandwidth. The main goal in traffic-aware routing is to avoid the condition that could occur in traditional routing [1, 3] where some nodes have to carry excessive traffic loads compared with the rest of the network [5,7]. The excessive load would result in high battery consumption at these nodes and regions in the network being more congested than others. Achieving a good load distribution in MANETs, where nodes in the network have comparable loads, is a challenging task. The issue is complicated not only because a full knowledge of the network status is required in order to make good decisions but also because *Correspondence to: Raad S. Al-Qassas, Department of Computer Science, Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Amman, Jordan. † E-mail: raad@psut.edu.jo Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.