PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF MANET ROUTING PROTOCOLS

Abstract

An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile hosts, forming a network without the aid of any established infrastructure or centralized administration. Due to limited transmission range of wireless mobile hosts, multiple network hops may be needed for one node to exchange data with another across the network. The key features of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) that distinguish them from ordinary infrastructured networks are dynamic topology, bandwidth constraints, variable capacity links, energy constrained operation and limited physical security. Routing is also a major challenge in MANETs. This has led to the development of a whole new set of routing protocols. In this dissertation, three routing protocols for MANETs have been compared, based on a simulation study. These are Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) Routing and Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) Routing. A generalized simulation framework has been developed to implement the protocols and their performance has been studied. The performance indices used are packet delivery ratio, overhead load, path optimality and scalability of protocols . More than one topology with different node distribution and varying number of nodes has been considered, so as to obtain more comprehensive results. The simulation software is developed using Sun Java 1.3 and is tested on Windows (98 & 2000) and Linux 7.3 platforms