Routing protocol Analysis for Heterogeneous Nodes in a Dynamic and Sparse Environment

The increasing demand for delivering communication services in regions with intermittent connectivity and low node density has motivated researchers to develop new routing protocols. There are many application dependent routing protocols in the literature to establish communication for densely connected MANETs to the highly mobile and Opportunistic DTNs (Delay Tolerant Networks). OceanNet aims to provide reliable communication services to the fishermen who take fishing trips that last for several days. In this paper, we study the existing research done on MANET, DTN and hybrid routing protocols. We adopt a system level simulation study for the OceanNet network topology using NS-3. The goal of this approach is to understand the network performance under various factors such as scalability, node movement and connectivity of different types of fishing vessels using MANET protocols. Simulation results show that choosing a single MANET protocol does not prove to be effective for the different scenarios considered in the network.