An Empirical Examination of Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

A Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is a self-organizing, temporary, infrastructure-free, multi-hop, dynamic topology wireless network that contains collection of cooperative autonomous freely roaming mobile nodes. The nodes communicate with each other by wireless radio links with no human intervention. Each mobile node functions as a specialized router to forward information to other mobile nodes. In order to provide efficient end-to-end communication with the network of nodes, a routing protocol is used to discover the optimal routes between the nodes. The routing protocols meant for wired networks can not be used for mobile ad hoc networks because of the mobility of nodes. Routing in ad hoc networks is nontrivial due to highly dynamic nature of the nodes. Various routing protocols have been proposed and widely evaluated for efficient routing of packets. This research paper presents an overview on classification of wide range of routing protocols for mobile ad hoc wireless networks proposed in the literature and shows the performance evaluation of the routing protocols: DSDV, AODV, FSR, LAR, OLSR, STAR and ZRP using the network simulator QualNet 4.0 to determine which protocols may perform best in large networks. To judge the merit of a routing protocol, one needs performance metrics (throughput, end-to-end delay, jitter, packet delivery ratio, routing overhead) with which to measure its suitability and performance. Our simulation experiments show that the LAR protocol achieve relatively good performance compared to other routing protocols

Comparative Analysis of Hybrid Routing Protocols Zrp, HCR and Anthocnet

“…1) Throughput [14]:The high throughput describe the more packets are sent onto the ad hoc network and more will be the performance of the network. It is the average rate of successful message/ packets delivery over a communication channel [2].…”

Analysis of Zone Routing Protocol in Manet

“…an on demand approach is used. So in Hybrid Routing Protocols, the route is established with proactive routes and uses reactive flooding for new mobile nodes [2]. In Hybrid Routing protocols, some of the characteristics of proactive and some of the characteristics of reactive protocols are combined, by maintaining intra-zone information proactively and inter-zone information reactively, into one to get better solution for mobile ad hoc networks [3].…”

“…Throughput [2]: Throughput is the average rate of successful data packets received at the destination [2]. It is the measure of how fast we can actually send the packets through the network.…”

MSDM: Maximally Spatial Disjoint Multipath Routing Protocol for MANET

“…In proactive routing protocols each node continuously maintains routing information about all other nodes in the network. These protocols incur considerable route maintenance overhead when compared with reactive protocols [1][2][3].…”

“…MANET's scarce resources such as battery based power and limited communications bandwidth make finding and maintaining a required route a key challenge. Proper design and selection of ad hoc routing protocols are needed to overcome these problems [1][2][3].…”