Performance Comparison of Routing Protocols of MANET in Real World Scenarios

Abstract

The increasing spread of mobile nodes along with popularity of high speed IEEE 802.11 standard series makes this kind of ad-hoc network, an important type of access network. Ad-hoc wireless networks are those networks that utilize multi-hop radio relaying and are capable of operating without the support of any fixed infrastructure. Due to limited transmission range, each node behaves as a host as well as a router and thus forwards the packets that are not intended for them, to other nodes and this lead to increase in coverage area. So routing is a core issue in MANET’s. MANET has certain characteristics like dynamic topology, limited bandwidth, limited CPU capacity, limited storage capacity, limited battery power, link failure and energy constraints, which imposes new demands on routing protocol. A variety of routing protocols have been developed to improve the performance of MANET’s with respect to correct and efficient route establishment and route maintenance between a pair of stations for message delivery. Examples of commonly used MANET routing protocols are destination sequenced distance vector routing protocol (DSDV), ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) and optimized link state routing protocol (OLSR), This present thesis aims to study the performance evaluation and comparison of these three prominent routing protocols based on three real life simulation scenarios. In the first scenario, students investigate the historical site where number of packets being sends and number of nodes in the network are varied. In second scenario rescue operation is studied where the speed with which the nodes move and number of mobile nodes are varied. And in last scenario students explore the national park where direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) rate and interval of two packets are varied. Different parameters are varied in different scenarios according to their importance in their respective scenario. Then finally routing efficiencies of these protocols are compared in each scenario, considering various performance metrics like throughput, average delay, total energy consumption and packet delivery ratio. Extensive simulations are made on scenarios using NS-3. In most simulations it is found that among the three protocols, the proactive routing protocols (DSDV, OLSR) performed significantly better than reactive routing protocol (AODV).