The Behavior of MANET Routing Protocols in Realistic Environments

This paper presents an analysis of MANET routing protocols´ behavior in realistic channel fading scenarios. The motivation of this study was due to our previous testbed experimentations where we found that AODV and DSDV´s performance did not match simulation results, primarily due to the use of a simple radio propagation model that did not take into account transient links caused by small-scale fading. Henceforth, we extended the ns-2 simulator with a realistic radio propagation model, that incorporated Rayleigh fading, to gain insights into the impact of transient links on AODV, DSR, and DSDVs behaviour. Our simulation studies explain each protocol´s key behavior that leads to the following conclusions: (1) routing through stable routes is important, (2) hop count is the root cause of poor performance, (3) the 2-ray ground radio propagation model is inappropriate for simulating ad-hoc protocols in indoor environments, and (4) local recovery is important