Performance Evaluation of Routing Protocols in MANET with Different Traffic Loads

The performance of the routing protocols in mobile Ad hoc networks degrades with increasing traffic load. Many routing protocols for such networks have been proposed so far. Amongst the most popular ones are Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV), Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector Routing protocol (DSDV), Dynamic Source Routing Protocol (DSR). In this paper we present our observations regarding the performance comparison of the above protocols for varying traffic load in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). We perform extensive simulations, using NS-2 simulator. Our studies have shown that reactive protocols perform better than proactive protocols.