A comparative analysis of MANET routing protocols for low cost rural telemetry Wireless Mesh Networks

In rural areas in Africa, the topographical conditions vary, including hilly areas or flat open areas with bushes, trees and vegetation. In some cases, road and infrastructure conditions are exceedingly poor, making it challenging and costly to provide necessary maintenance and support to communication networks. When a node goes offline the remaining nodes must be able to re-establish links with each other and maintain connectivity. The routing protocol must discover an alternative shortest path route and use this path to deliver the data. The maintenance time can be slow and it might take days to attend to the faulty node in a rural area. Due to this, the network must be able to operate for long periods with the faulty node(s) and provide the best possible Quality of Service (QoS). In the past few years, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have attracted an increase in research and use due to their attractive characteristics, which include low deployment cost, a low cost option to extend network coverage and ease of maintenance due to their self healing properties. In WMNs, with an increase in scalability, the throughput of the network tends to decrease. In this paper, we carried out a performance analysis for failing node scenarios for rural telemetry networks using three protocols, namely OLSR (a proactive protocol), DSR (a reactive protocol) and HWMP (a hybrid protocol). The performance analysis of these protocols was carried out using three backhaul network topology scenarios. The simulation results were obtained using OMNET++ and the INETMANET framework. Performance metrics used for the analysis and study were packet loss and end-to-end latency as these are major factors considered for providing guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS).