It was jointly developed by Charles Perkins (Sun Microsystems) and Elizabeth Royer (now Elizabeth Belding) (University of California, Santa Barbara) and was first published in the ACM 2nd IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications in February 1999.
In addition, each network component assigned to routing functionality stores its own path index, which contains the address of the next node in the direction of the destination (next hop), its sequence number, and the total distance given in hops, or possibly other metrics designed to measure link quality.
In AODV, the network remains completely silent until a connection is required to forward a data packet.
RREQ packets are broadcast from the source node, so a burst of messages is generated and forwarded through the entire network.
In fact, the algorithm itself is completely irrelevant as long as it does not turn out to be necessary to send a packet to a node whose route is unknown.