Dynamic Source Routing Protocol

1. Introduction
Mobile hosts such as notebook computers, featuring powerful CPUs, large main memories, hundreds of megabytes of disk space, multimedia sound capabilities, and colour displays, are now easily affordable and are becoming quite common in everyday business and personal life. At the same time, network connectivity options for use with mobile hosts have increased dramatically, including support for a growing number of wireless networking products based on radio and infrared. With this type of mobile computing equipment, there is a natural desire and ability to share information between mobile users. Often, mobile users will meet under circumstances that are not explicitly planned for and in which no connection to a standard wide-area network such as the Internet is available. For example, employees may find themselves together in a meeting room; friends or business associates may run into each other in an airport terminal; or a collection of computer science researchers may gather in a hotel ballroom for a workshop or conference. Requiring each user to connect to a wide-area network in such situations, only to communicate with each other, may not be possible due to lack of facilities, or may be inconvenient or impractical due to the time or expense required for such connection.
These kinds of networks of mobile hosts have become known as ad hoc networks. An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile hosts forming a temporary network without the aid of any centralized administration or standard support services regularly available on the wide-area network to which the hosts may normally be connected.
Some form of routing protocol is in general necessary in such an environment, since two hosts that may wish to exchange packets might not be able to communicate directly.
For example, Figure 1 illustrates a simple ad hoc network of three mobile hosts using wireless network interfaces. Host C is not within the range of host A’s wireless transmitter...