Performance Evaluation of DSR and DSDV Routing Protocols for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

A Wireless ad hoc network is a collection of autonomous mobile nodes that communicate with each other over wireless links without any fixed infrastructure. The nodes use the service of other nodes in the network to transmit packets to destinations that are out of their range. Such networks are expected to play increasingly important role in future organizations, University, Civilian and Military settings, being useful for providing communication support where no fixed infrastructure exists. Also, in case of disaster or natural calamities, the deployment of a fixed infrastructure is neither feasible nor economically profitable for establishing communication among the rescue members. In order to accomplish this, a number of ad-hoc routing protocols have been proposed and implemented, which include dynamic source routing (DSR) and Destination sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) routing protocols. In this paper for experimental evaluation purposes, we have considered 500m x 500m, terrain area which illustrates the performance in terms of the packet delivery fraction and throughput for DSR and DSDV routing protocols. Our simulation results using NS-2 shows that DSR performs better in both the case of packet delivery fraction and throughput over DSDV routing protocol.