Routing and reliable transport layer protocols interactions in MANETs

Several research works have attempted to study the performance of TCP and SCTP in MANETS. In this paper we further aim to study the effects of these two transport layer protocols and that of the underlying routing protocols using a two-factor full factorial experimental design with replication through simulations. The routing protocols considered are AODV, DSR, and DSDV. Our motivation is that despite the efforts in comparing the different protocols at each layer separately, little is known about which layer has the greater effect on throughput in MANETS, and hence deserves further research, and how relevant the interaction between the layers is. We attempted to use mobility models to reflect realistic mobility scenarios. Our results show that the transport layer protocols have significant effect on throughput regardless of the routing layer protocol used: SCTP outperformed TCP in all cases.