Comparative Study of Proactive and Reactive AdHoc Routing Protocols Using Ns2

A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary network without using any centralized access point or administration. MANET protocols have to face high challenges due to dynamically changing topologies, low transmission power and asymmetric links of network. An attempt has been made to compare the performance of two On-demand reactive routing protocols namely AODV and DSR which works on gateway discovery algorithms and a proactive routing protocol namely DSDV which works on an algorithm to constantly update network topology information available to all nodes for MANETs on different scenarios. In this paper comparison is made on the basis of performance metrics such as throughput, packet loss and end-to-end delay, and the simulator used is NS-2 in Ubuntu operating system (Linux). The simulations are carried out by varying the packet size, number of connecting nodes at a time and pause time and the results are analyzed.