Evaluating Effectiveness of DSDV Routing Protocol on IEEE 802.11n Wireless LANs

High-speed Wireless LANs based on 802.11 technologies are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. IEEE 802.11n is the last standard toward achieving higher speeds and aims to enhance 802.11 for higher throughput. Few works studied 802.11n medium access control (MAC) layer, but unfortunately, effects of higher physical rates is still unknown to the upper layers and especially routing layer of these networks. The main purpose of this paper is to assess efficiency of routing algorithms on IEEE 802.11n networks. We selected DSDV routing protocol, as one the popular algorithms, for this purpose. Based on various studies and simulations carried out, results indicate that increase in physical layer speed, does not necessarily lead to improving throughput and efficiency of the network layer. In addition, results indicate that 802.11n performs slightly better than 802.11 for large enough packet sizes; also we show the DSDV routing algorithm flaws when it work on 802.11n. Index Terms -IEEE 802.11n, Routing Protocols, Routing Algorithms, High-Speed Wireless Networks.