Node density and traffic based modelling and analysis of routing protocols for MANETs

Wireless networking is an emerging technology that allows users to access information and services regardless of their geographic position. Further, the development of ubiquitous mobile computing devices has also raised increasing demand in sharing streaming video and audio in various applications like video conferencing, video chat, etc. along with simple file transfers. A community Internet Engineering Task Force [1] is already working on development of several routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks. However, the performance of each routing protocol is different from each other in different scenarios. Hence, the main investigation done in this paper is of the discrete feature and routing in MANET. The main issue of MANET is the breakage of link at certain moment and re-generation of link at certain state as it consists of routers which are mobile in nature i.e. are independent to roam in an arbitrary motion. Considering the above real time applications, this paper focuses on performance analysis of routing protocols based on their node density and traffic pattern for a fixed size campus area. This paper evaluates four routing protocols i.e. AODV, DSR, OLSR and TORA protocols for wireless mobile ad-hoc networks based on performance for different node density for real-time traffics. The performance metrics are taken as delay, network load and throughput. The comparison analysis is carried out about these protocols, and in the last the conclusion is presented to determine the better routing protocols for particular scenarios. All the experimental set up and simulations is done using OPNET v14.5 Simulator.