A comparative study of routing protocols in MANETs

Mobile Ad Hoc networks are emerging area of mobile computing. A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is composed of mobile routers and associated hosts connected by wireless links. The routers are free to move randomly and organize themselves arbitrarily, thus, the network\u27s wireless topology may change rapidly and unpredictably. In fact, it is considered that each node would have some capacity to relay the information thus constrained by computational power, battery life and increasingly complex routing with added functionality of a router. Nodes may keep joining and leaving an ad hoc network. Such a network may operate in a stand alone fashion, or may be connected to the larger Internet. Lack of infrastructure in ad hoc networks sets new challenges for routing algorithms where the network is formed by a collection of wireless mobile nodes dynamically forming a temporary network without the use of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. A number of routing protocols like Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV), Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector (DSDV), Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) and Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA) have been implemented. In this thesis an attempt has been made to compare the performance of prominent on-demand reactive routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (AODV and TORA), along with the traditional proactive DSDV protocol. Although AODV and TORA share similar on-demand behavior, the differences in the protocol mechanics can lead to significant performance differentials. The performance differentials are analyzed using varying network loads, mobilities, and network sizes. These simulations are carried out using network simulator (ns-2.1b9a) to run mobile ad hoc network simulations