Performance comparison of AODV and HWMP routing protocols in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have gain attention from researchers in telecommunication engineering field due to its potential to provide low cost internet broadband access, wireless local area network coverage and network connectivity for stationary or mobile host. This network consists of multiple wireless routers that are used to relay each other's packet in multi-hop fashion. Hence, routing protocol plays an important part in maintaining the connectivity of WMNs. In this paper, two routing protocols, Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Hybrid Wireless Mesh Routing Protocol (HWMP) are compared in terms of their performance in WMNs. A random wireless mesh topology with router nodes is modelled in Network Simulator 3 by assuming that the router nodes are connected to its client nodes. The simulations are performed in two different topologies with varied number of nodes. Three merits are taken into account when making the comparisons which are packet delivery fraction, throughput, and end-to-end delay. The simulation results demonstrate that HWMP is more suitable to be applied in WMNs compared to AODV.