Performance comparison of end-to-end and on-the-spot traffic-aware techniques

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 improvement 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.