Performance evaluation of AODV and OLSR routing protocols in MANET environment

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are self-sufficient networks that can work without the need for centralized controls, pre-configuration to the routes or advance infrastructures. The nodes of a MANET are autonomously controlled, which allow them to act freely in a random manner within the MANET. The nodes can leave their MANET and join other MANETs at any time. These characteristics, however, might negatively affect the performance of the routing protocols and the overall topology of the networks. Subsequently, MANETs comprise specially designed routing protocols that reactively and proactively perform the routing. This paper evaluates and compares the performance of two routing protocols which are Ad-Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) in MANET environment. The study includes implementing a simulation to examine the performance of the routing protocols based on the variables of the nodes’ number and network size. The evaluation results show that the AODV outperforms the OLSR in most of the simulated cases. The results further show that the number of nodes and network size has a great impact on the Throughput (TH), Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), and End-to-End delay (E2E) of the network