Simulation Based Evaluation of Reactive Routing Protocol for MANET

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are an emerging class of network architectures that are characterized by their highly dynamic topology, limited resources (i.e., bandwidth and power), and lack of fixed infrastructure. Nodes being highly mobile in nature throw a challenge in routing of packets between a pair of source and destination. Instead of relying on a base station to coordinate the flow of messages to each node in the network, the individual network node forward packet to and from each other. The work carried out in this paper is an analysis on the performance of two prominent on-demand routing protocols for mobile Ad-Hoc networks: Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Ad-Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) under an environment where nodes are considered to follow freeway mobility pattern. It was evident that even though DSR and AODV share similar on demand behaviour, the differences in the protocol mechanics can lead to significant performance differentials.