Performance Comparison of DSDV, OLSR, DSR and AODV MANET Routing Protocols in Traffic Conditions

The mobile Ad hoc networks (MANETs) are wireless networks where a collection of mobile nodes may dynamically vary the topological structure. With respect to the more widely used mobile cellular networks (GSM), MANETs do not use any form of fixed infrastructure or central co-coordinator. The characteristics of MANETs are dynamic topology rather than a static or fixed, constrained bandwidth, variable-capacity links, limited physical security and energy-constrained operations. Since MANETs are self-configured, and allow ubiquitous service access, irrespective of time and place without any fixed infrastructure they can have several types of applications like rescue operations, military, law enforcement and security operation, home network and conferencing. Apart of these the challenging issue of MANETs is routing, where in many different protocols have been proposed in the literature papers, each one based on different characteristics and properties. Basically MANETs protocols are classified based on routing table maintenance i. e. , Table driven and on demand. Table driven Maintain routes with every host at all time, where on demand Creates routes to remote hosts on-demand. Therefore focus in this paper is to compare the performance of four routing protocols DSDV, OLSR (Proactive) and DSR, AODV (reactive) for CBR, FTP traffic by varying no. of nodes in terms of throughput, end to end delay and packet loss. The simulation is carried out on NS2.