SUMMARYSince the inception of the dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol for mobile ad hoc networks, several enhancements have been proposed, along with other competing routing protocols. All of them provide different degrees of throughput improvement under different scenarios. In this paper, we use DSR as a base, diagnose the contribution of its constituent components, and provide the reason why certain routing enhancements can increase the throughput and under what conditions. A major finding of the study is that the broadcast mechanism used in propagating route request and route error messages has a significant impact on how routing behaves. We also show that unicast route error report and preventive cache update improve throughput at different sides of the mobility spectrum. Finally, we show that aggressive buffer combined with route management provides the best performance improvement on the entire mobility and loading spectrum. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.