It is a reactive routing protocol, meaning that it establishes a route to a destination only on demand. In contrast, the most common routing protocols of the Internet are proactive, meaning they find routing paths independently of the usage of the paths. AODV is, as the name indicates, a distance-vector routing protocol. AODV avoids the counting-to-infinity problem of other distance-vector protocols by using sequence numbers on route updates, a technique pioneered by DSDV. AODV is capable of both unicast and multicast routing.