Routing Protocol Performance Evaluation for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Currently, MANETs are a very active area of research, due to their great potential to provide networking capabilities when it is not feasible to have a fixed infrastructure in place, or to provide a complement to the existing infrastructure. Routing in this kind of network is much more challenging than in conventional networks, due to its mobile nature and limited power and hardware resources. The most practical way to conduct routing studies of MANETs is by means of simulators such as GloMoSim. GloMoSim was utilized in this research to investigate various performance statistics and draw comparisons among different MANET routing protocols, namely AODV, LAR (augmenting DSR), FSR (also known as Fisheye), WRP, and Bellman-Ford (algorithm). The network application used was FTP, and the network traffic was generated with tcplib [Danzig91]. The performance statistics investigated were application bytes received, normalized application bytes received, routing control packets transmitted, and application byte delivery ratio. The scenarios tested consisted of an airborne application at a high (26.8 m/s) and a low speed (2.7 m/s) on a 2000 m x 2000 m domain for nodal values of 36, 49, 64, 81, and 100 nodes, and radio transmit power levels of 7.005, 8.589, and 10.527 dBm. Nodes were paired up in fixed client-server couples involving 10% and 25% of the nodes being V111 clients and the same quantity being servers. AODV and LAR showed a significant margin of performance advantage over the remaining protocols in the scenarios tested