Performance of standardized routing protocols in ad-hoc networks

Mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes that form dynamic and temporary networks. The wireless links in this network are highly error prone and can go down frequently due to mobility of nodes, interference, and less infrastructure. One of the challenges in the study of MANET routing protocols is the dynamically changing topology. Hence, they establish an efficient communication path between the source and destination nodes with minimum routing overhead and bandwidth consumption. The design problem of such routing protocol is not straightforward since MANET environment introduces new challenges that are not present in fixed networks. In this paper, we study and compare the performance of the following routing protocols AODV, DSR, DSDV, RAODV, AOMDV, and TORA. Network Simulator (NS) version 2.34 is used to study the relative performance of the routing protocols varying network traffic load and pause time. The results show that AOMDV has better performance than RAODV and AODV in terms of average end-to-end delay.