Performance Based Comparative Analysis of AODV, DSR and DSDV Protocols w.r.t UDP and TCP

Abstract

A Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is a kind of wireless ad-hoc network, and is a self configuring network of mobile routers (and associated hosts) connected by wireless links – the union of which forms an arbitrary topology. The routers are free to move randomly and organize themselves arbitrarily, thus the network's wireless topology may change rapidly and unpredictably. Such a network may operate in a standalone fashion, or may be connected to the larger Internet. There are various routing protocols available for MANETs. The most popular ones are DSR, AODV and DSDV. In this thesis, an attempt has been made to compare these three protocols on the performance basis under different environments. The comparison has been done under two protocols namely UDP and TCP. The tools used for the simulation are NS2 which is the main simulator, NAM (Network Animator) and Tracegraph which is used for preparing the graphs from the trace files. The results presented in this thesis work clearly indicate that the different protocols behave differently under different environments. The results also illustrate the important characteristics of different protocols based on their performance and thus suggest some improvements in the respective protocols. Keywords: MANET, AODV, DSR, DSDV, NS2, NAM, UDP, TCP, Tracegraph.