Comparative Analysis of Routing Protocols in Ad-hoc Networks

An ad hoc wireless network consists of a set of hosts (mobile nodes) which are connected together by wireless links. The nodes can communicate with each other using different routing protocols. The routing protocols perform well when the nodes are stationary but degrade drastically when the nodes are mobile. A variety of routing protocols have been proposed for ad hoc networks in the past. Based on update mechanisms, they are classified into reactive, proactive and hybrid routing protocols. The performance of these protocols varies depending on the simulation environment. Many researchers have been working in this direction to evaluate the performance of these protocols in different simulation environments. The simulations can be done on Qualnet, NS2, and Omnet++ etc. The main aim of this project is to explore this fact and compare the performance of three different protocols-AODV, STAR and ZRP which constitutes a good combination of on-demand (reactive), table-driven (proactive) and hybrid protocols respectively. It is taken into account that these protocols are the best protocols in their respective domains due to their low overhead. The performance of these protocols will be analyzed by keeping the nodes static, dynamic and then semi dynamic. The pause time of each node is varied so as to depict a real world scenario in case of semi dynamic. The evaluation is done by considering the performance metrics- throughput, jitter, average end to end delay and packet delivery ratio. The simulator used is Qualnet 7.1