In AODV, routes are discovered in an on-demand basis and are maintained as long as they are required. Like DSDV it maintains a sequence number, which it increases each time it finds a change in the topology of its neighborhood. This sequence number ensures that the most recent route is selected for execution of the route discovery. AODV is able to provide unicast, multicast and broadcast communication ability. Combination of the three makes it an advantageous protocol. AODV is capable of operating on both wired and wireless media, although it has been designed specifically for wireless domain. Route tables used by AODV store the destination and next hop IP addresses as well as the destination sequence number. AODV also provide quick deletion of invalid routes in response the route ERROR messages generated due to link breakage. If a node fails to receive consecutive HELLO messages from a neighbor, it is concluded that link is broken for the specific node and a RERR message is broadcasted to any upstream node. In fact a more conservative routing table and sequence number driven approach is utilized in AODV. Compared to DSR, AODV has better performance because AODV does not use source routing whereby the entire route is carried by the packet header, thus increasing the size of the header. Source route size grows with route length, so the network is not scalable. AODV relies on dynamically establishing route table entries at intermediate nodes. This difference pays off in networks with many nodes where a larger overhead is incurred by carrying source routes in each data packet.