Comparative Performance Evaluation of Mobile Ad-hoc Network Routing Protocols using NS2 Simulator

A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is an independent assortment of mobile users that communicate over moderately bandwidth constrained wireless links. MANET’s topology is dynamic that can change rapidly because the nodes move freely and can organize themselves randomly; has the advantage of being quickly deployable. Although numerous routing protocols have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks, there is no universal scheme that works well in scenarios with different network sizes, traffic loads and node mobility patterns, so mobile ad hoc routing protocol election presents a great challenge. In this paper, an attempt has been made to compare the performance of three routing protocols in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks – Ad-Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV). We have evaluated the performance of these routing protocols with varying the number of mobile nodes and packet sizes on the basis of four important metrics such as packet delivery ratio, average end to end delay, normalized routing overhead and throughput. Network Simulator version 2.35 (NS-2.35) is used as the simulation tool for evaluating these performance metrics. The outcome of this research shows that AODV protocol outperforms DSDV and DSR protocols.