Dynamic Source Routing : Introduction
Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) comes under the reactive routing
protocol category, as it is capable of discovering the route from source to
destination only when required and needed.
Dynamic Source Routing protocol uses a process called “Route Discovery
Mechanism” that is capable of discovering the route for data packets
from source node to destination nodes using intermediate nodes.
As like proactive routing protocols such as Global State Routing an
Dynamic Sequence Distance Vector Routing no separate table is
maintained.
The major change in DSR as compare to GSR and DSDV is, in DSDV after
asking a requirement of route from source to destination, path via
intermediate nodes is checked for its length. Then a “Re-Request” packet
is sent back from destination to source via the smallest route possible in
the whole network. The “Re-Request” packet does contains its unique ID
also.
This process of separately sending a “Re-Request” packet from
destination to source makes it easier for the sender to send the data
packets on fixed path rather than sending it on multiple paths to check
for total distance.
Dynamic Source Routing Protocol : Working
Dynamic Source Routing does broadcast the route to its neighbors but
does not floods the information. It only trace the route by calculating the
total distance or by calculating the number of nodes present in between
source and destination nodes.
Consider a network containing 10 nodes where node N1 being the source
and node N10 being the destination nodes. Below mentioned steps will
let you know how DSR protocol works and how Re-Request packet is
transmitted through the network.
Dynamic Source Routing : Network
Step 1: Start from source node N1 and broadcast the information about
it to its neighbors i.e. in this case the route information is “<1>”, because
of its one-to-one link between node N1 and N2.
Step 2: Broadcast previous route information to neighbors of node N2
i.e. to node N3, N4, N5. The new route will remain same “<1,2>” in all
the cases.
Step 3: Take node N3 and broadcast previous route(<1,2>) to
next neighboring nodes i.e. node N6. New route till node N6 will be
“<1,2,3>” and same process can be done for other nodes i.e. Node N4
and N5.
Step 4 : Further, broadcast the new routes i.e. <1,2,3,6> , <1,2,4> ,
<1,2,5> to nodes N8, N7 & N9 respectively.
Step 5: Repeat the above steps until destination node is reached via all
the routes.
The updated routes will be as:
Dynamic Source Routing : Updated Network
After this, “Re-Request” packet will be sent in backward direction i.e.
from destination node “N10” to source node “N1”. It will trace the
shortest route by counting the number of nodes from route discovered in
previous steps.
The three possible routes are :
o Route 1: <1,2,3,6,8>
o Route 2: <1,2,4,7,8>
o Route 3: <1,2,5,9>
Route 3 i.e. "<1,2,5,9>” will be chosen as it contains the least number of
nodes and hence it will definitely be the shortest path and then data can
be transferred accordingly.
The Re-Request Packet route can be located as:
Dynamic Source Routing
Advantages : Dynamic Source Routing Protocol
A perfect route is discovered always.
Highly efficient.
Low bandwidth Consumption.
Disadvantages : Dynamic Source Routing Protocol
If the route gets broke, data transmission cannot happen.
Time taking algorithm-Slow.
If network is large , then it is impossible for the data packets header to
hold whole information of the routes.
