Evaluation of Routing Protocols for Ad Hoc Mobile Wireless Networks

Abstract

Mobile ad-hoc networking is a conception in computer communications, which means that users who necessitate communicating with each other form a temporary network, without any form of centralized administration. Mobile ad-hoc network has definite characteristics, which imposes new demands on the routing protocol. The mainly significant characteristic is the dynamic topology, which is a effect of node mobility. Nodes can alter position quite commonly, which means that we require a routing protocol that rapidly adapts to topology changes. The nodes in an ad-hoc network can consist of laptops and individual digital assistants and are habitually very partial in resources such as storage capacity, CPU capacity, battery power and bandwidth. This means that the routing protocol must try to minimize control traffic, such as periodic update messages.Instead the routing protocol should be reactive, thus only calculate routes ahead receiving a particular request.

The presented work evaluates three of the protocols (AODV, DSR and TORA) against the parameters put forth by the Mobile ad-hoc Network’s working group. This evaluation is done by way of simulation using Network simulator 2 from Berkeley. These three protocols are DSR, AODV and TORA, Each having its fair of advantages and limitations.Routing protocols utilize numerous metrics to calculate the best path for routing the packets to its destination, comparison between the AODV, DSR and TORA routing protocol by means of the average end to end delay, packet loss and packet delivery fraction performance metrics. A huge network with many mobile nodes and high offered load will increase the overhead for DSR quite drastically. In these situations, a hop-by hop based routing protocol like AODV is more enviable.