Performance Evaluation and Analysis of Cluster Based Routing Protocols in MANETs

Mobile ad hoc network is a collection of mobile nodes communicating through wireless channels without any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. Due of the limited transmission range of wireless network, multiple "hops" are needed to exchange data across the network. In order to facilitate communication within the network, a routing protocol is used to discover routes between nodes. The primary goal of such an adhoc network routing protocol is efficient route establishment between a pair of nodes so that messages may be delivered in a timely manner. Route construction should be done with a minimum of overhead and bandwidth consumption. This paper mainly focuses on cluster-based routing protocol (CBRP) and its comparative analysis with two other routing protocols : Adhoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) on the basis of packet delivery fraction, normalized routing overhead and average delay with varying number of sources and pause time.