Performance comparison and evaluation of the proactive and reactive routing protocols for MANETs

Mobile ad hoc networks contain wireless mobile nodes to construct dynamic networks without support of any fixed infrastructure. The nodes or hosts in the network are all movable and self-configurable. At the same time, they serve as routers to deliver data from sources to their destinations. To meet performance requirements of this kind of network, the routers have to work efficiently together. Therefore, routing algorithms play a crucial role in MANET architecture design. This paper presents performance evaluations and analyses for two flat routing protocol types: Proactive and Reactive routing protocols. This paper will also show the simulation results of evaluating the routing overhead, throughput and end-to-end delay of a MANET. Lastly, a performance justification of the simulation results will be presented.