The multi-hop ad hoc networks are self organizing networks with dynamic topology. The reactive and proactive protocols are designed to handle these dynamically changing networks. Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) Routing Protocol is one such Reactive protocol that has been widely adopted in MANETs. In this protocol, routes are maintained as and when required, i.e. they operate 'On Demand'. AODV relies on 'Hello' messages to maintain local link connectivity. The hello messages are sent periodically, the period of which is defined by 'AODV hello interval. In this paper, we investigate the performance of AODV protocol by varying the hello interval. The performance is analyzed in terms of Quality of Service parameters such as throughput, End-to-end Delay and PDR. Our experimental results show that the performance of AODV is improved when hello interval is increased.

Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector routing protocol (AODV) is a reactive routing protocol used in MANETs that makes use of Hello Messages for local Link connectivity. Every node in a network broadcasts hello messages to all its neighbours at a default hello interval of 1 second. However, this continuous broadcast leads to unnecessary energy consumption and energy utilization. This paper suggests an Adaptive Hello messaging based approach that modifies the Hello message broadcast mechanism of AODV. This approach makes the hello interval adaptive by making it directly proportional to event interval thereby suppressing unnecessary hello messages and breakage of links to the destination without adversely affecting the network performance in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, PDR and jitter.