17.3 Advantages of the new node structure

The revision of the node structure was mainly made to break up the node srtucture into different modules that would allow much easier and efficient reconstruction of a new node type and give a cleaner and easily extensible node creation interface. The several advantages of the new node structure over the old model is listed as follows:

1.

The new modularised node architecture allows much more flexibility. The API can now be easily extended to include other features/options in the node structure.

2.

The node structure has been broken up into different modules like the basic node module (default) , the network stack, the wired routing agent, the adhoc routing agent, the energy model etc. And this allows sharing of common modules within the node structure between different types of node.

3.

Now we can create a new node type by simply plumbing - donot need to recreate the whole node. Also there is no need to create node classes obeying the Node class-hierarchy.

4.

The more flexible, modular, efficient and easily extensible node model thus promotes easier and faster future development compared to the older, more rigid version.