Time To Live (TTL) Impact On The Performance Of STAR Protocol In MANETs

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a developing area in the existing mobile environment. Its standards are defined by IETF. MANETs consists of several characteristics like dynamic topology, easy deployment and robustness which make them as a striking topic for the research community. Routing, enhancing the QoS is a challenging issue in MANETs. In this paper, one of the best proactive routing protocols ie Source Tree Adaptive Routing (STAR) protocol has been chosen. The selection of the stable configurable values in protocol will affect QoS performance. In MANETs, Time to Live (TTL) is a constant value and it has to be configured with network size accordingly. The impact of TTL value on the performance of STAR routing protocol has been analyzed. Simulation results suggest that the impact of TTL shows significant change on the performance of STAR at all network sizes with lower mobility. This paper shows that static values like TTL are not suitable for dynamic environment in protocol configuration and suggests that the TTL value should be a varied with the network size and mobility speed accordingly to achieve better performance.