Performance of Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

The performance comparison of routing protocols for a mobile ad-hoc network based on a realistic setting. Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) consist of independent wireless nodes that are free to move. These nodes do not require any fixed infrastructure or centralized administration for their functioning. The primary issue affecting MANETs due to their dynamically changing topology is the overall performance. This makes the choice of routing protocol very crucial for the performance enhancement of MANETs. In addition to that, routing of packets with robustness is one of the fundamental challenges when it comes to deploying MANETs. The scenario is simulated using the ns-3 network simulator which is one of the most widely used simulation tools. The comparison of protocols is done for various parameters and a thorough analysis of the observations is made. The mechanism for selecting a routing protocol for the scenario under consideration involves analyzing all the performance metrics and comparing which protocol performs the best against the metrics. It is observed that proactive routing protocols like OLSR and DSDV perform better than reactive protocols like AODV and DSR. Among all the protocols considered in this work, OLSR produces the best overall performance.