An Empirical Examination of Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is a self-organizing, temporary, infrastructure-free, multi-hop, dynamic topology wireless network that contains collection of cooperative autonomous freely roaming mobile nodes. The nodes communicate with each other by wireless radio links with no human intervention. Each mobile node functions as a specialized router to forward information to other mobile nodes. In order to provide efficient end-to-end communication with the network of nodes, a routing protocol is used to discover the optimal routes between the nodes. The routing protocols meant for wired networks can not be used for MANETs because of the mobility of nodes. Routing in ad hoc networks is nontrivial due to highly dynamic nature of the nodes. Various routing protocols have been proposed and widely evaluated for efficient routing of packets. This research paper presents an overview on classification of wide range of routing protocols for mobile ad hoc wireless networks proposed in the literature and shows the performance evaluation of the routing protocols: DSDV, AODV, FSR, LAR, OLSR, STAR and ZRP using the network simulator QualNet 4.0 to determine which protocols may perform best in large networks. To judge the merit of a routing protocol, one needs performance metrics (throughput, end-to-end delay, jitter, packet delivery ratio, routing overhead) with which to measure its suitability and performance. Our simulation experiments show that the LAR protocol achieves relatively good performance compared to other routing protocols.