Performance investigation using different software of Dynamic Source Routing in ad-hoc networks

Ad-hoc network is a self organizing network that consists of mobile nodes. Each node acts as a router that forwards the data to other nodes in the network. Ad hoc routing protocols are affected by mobility of the nodes and network scalability. In this paper, the performance of Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) is studied through simulation, using NS2, and QualNet. The effects of mobility and network scalability for different network scenarios will be investigated. The performance results show that there exist significant divergences, among the results obtained by the two software packages, when the network scaled to a large number of nodes or the traffic sources increased. An analytical model to compute the number of route errors is presented. We expect that these results will be very helpful to engineers in designing ad-hoc routing protocols, and their decision about the type of network and the appropriate software tool they will use.