Simulation Based Comparative Performance Analysis of Mobile Ad Hoc Routing Protocols

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a group of mobile nodes that are dynamically and arbitrarily located in such a manner that the interconnections between nodes are capable of changing on a continual basis. Routing in MANET is very important issue as dynamic topology of MANET makes routing very difficult. This paper shows comparative performance evaluation of two prominent on-demand reactive routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR). Performance is compared on the parameters like Packet delivery ratio i. e. throughput, Average end to end delay and Normalized routing overhead using network simulator-2 (NS-2). The general observation of the results indicate that considered protocols react in similar way in low load and low mobility scenarios, but under high mobility DSR outperforms AODV protocol, although DSR and AODV share similar on-demand behavior.