Performance Analysis of 802.16 (WIMAX) Networks under Various Routing Protocols and Traffic Loads

The selection of an appropriate routing protocol is a key issue when designing a scalable and efficient wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate different routing protocols and evaluate their performances on 802.16 WiMAX networks. Further, we present a comparison between 802.16 and 802.11 ad hoc networks based on the performances of various rerouting protocols. The simulation results show that the table driven DSDV protocol has the best performance in terms of the delivery fraction which outperforms the rest of the protocols. In addition, we also assert from the experiments that packet delay experienced by DSDV protocol is very high. Hence, there should be a tradeoff between various performance parameters when using the DSDV protocol in 802.16 networks.