Simulation Based Performance Comparison of AODV, AOMDV, DSR and MDART Routing Protocols in MANETS?

Mobile ad hoc network is a self organizing, autonomous network of mobile nodes that can be established anywhere without any need of fixed infrastructure or central administration. In MANETS topology is highly dynamic and resources are limited so routing has been a very important area of research. Many routing protocols have been proposed by various researchers. Still there is a scope for improvement of these existing protocols or some new protocols can be proposed. In this paper, an attempt has been made to simulate AODV, AOMDV, DSR and MDART using NS2 simulator and compare their performance for different metrics packet delivery ratio, normalized routing load, routing overhead and number of packets dropped. DSR performed the best and MDART performed the worst in most of the scenarios.