An interference aware approach for routing in UWB networks

Ultra Wideband (UWB) is a promising technology thanks to its unique physical characteristics. For this purpose, many works have already treated issues regarding UWB system. Most of them analyzed only first two ISO/OSI levels, that are physical and MAC layers, while too few investigations are yet spent on the routing layer of UWB systems. However, traditional approaches are not valid for UWB systems because they do not take into account of interference between nodes, that is not a trivial problem in these networks. The main goal of our work is to propose a new on demand routing protocol, called Interference Aware-based Ad-hoc on Demand Distance Vector (IA-AODV), based on the concept of interference perceived by the nodes: so, the optimum route is chosen on the basis of the minimum perceived interference, improving in this way the general system performance. To test the proposed protocol a ns-2 based simulator was realized. The protocol was compared with the AODV and IBOR protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and normalized overhead. Simulation results show as our protocol outperforms the others protocols in all considered scenarios: only in few cases IA-AODV presents an overhead slightly higher than AODV. © 2009 IEEE.