A Comparative Analysis of OLSR, DSR and ZRP Routing Protocols in MANETs

A Mobile Ad-Hoc networks (MANETs) is collection of autonomous wireless nodes that are arbitrarily located which move dynamically by changing its network connectivity without the use of any pre-existent infrastructure. The behavior of ad-hoc network is characterized as non-deterministic (interference, multipath, hidden and exposed node problem make wireless channel very difficult to predict). Its routing protocol should not only capable of finding the optimized routes between the source and destination, but should also be adaptive in terms of changing load conditions of the network, changing state of the nodes and changing state of the environment. This paper aims to compare performance of Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR) and Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP). The performance analysis is based on different network metrics in heterogeneous environment such as Throughput (bits/sec), Delay (sec) and Retransmission attempts (packets) using well known network simulator OPNET 14.5.