c. initiator does not receive back any packet if and
only if it is isolated.
In order to prove issue (a) above, note that receiv-
ing RREPs means that the replies queue in the Initia-
tor submachine is not empty, and this occurs if and
only if the UnicastRREP rule has been executed, be-
cause only this rule enqueues an RREP into replies.
In turn, the UnicastRREP rule is executed if and only
if that router or one of its neighbors is the destination,
or a route to destination is recorded into its routing
table. Analogous proofs for issues (b) and (c).
Finally, it is easy to show that the execution of
the protocol goes only through the described states:
the execution of the rules transform the values of the
functions only to the desired states. So, no unexpected
behavior can occur.
5 CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have formally presented N-AODV: a
variant of the AODV routing protocol for MANETs.
The main advantage of the variant is that the hosts in
the MANET can indirectly obtain information about
the network topology more quickly than in AODV
thanks to NACKs. In fact, in AODV the routing tables
are updated on RREQ or RREP receiving, and more
precisely, when the node n
i
receives a packet sent by
n
0
that traversed the chain (n
0
, n
1
, . . . , n
i−1
, n
i
), n
i
updates its routing table only in entries concerning n
0
and n
i−1
. Instead, N-AODV updates all entries n
0
, n
1
,
. . . , n
i
− 1.
The research will continue with the aim to investi-
gate how properly managing the knowledge carried
on by NACKs and recording it into routing tables.
Secondly, we are interested into formally analyze
some computationally interesting properties, such as
starvation-freedom, reversibility of the execution, and
so on. Finally, if protocol performance issues are con-
sidered, it is worth noting that the use of NACKs in-
jects overhead in the computation activities carried
out by hosts, so, this overhead will be investigated
through simulations, for evaluating if it is adequately
balanced by the information gain obtained.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work has been partially funded by the Ital-
ian Ministry of Education, University and Research
(MIUR), within the Piano Operativo Nazionale –
PON02 00563 3489339.
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