Evaluating Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Under Varying Network Scenarios

The Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) mostly relies on a reliable routing protocol for its proper functioning. Due to infrastructure-less feature the routing protocols have to make use of routing tables on every node that contain a topology information. But, mobility brings fundamental challenge to the efficient design. Today, several state of the art routing schemes those are based on the standard routing protocols viz. Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Ad Hoc on Demand Distance Vector (AODV) are available to deal with the situations of frequent topology changes. Although all these standard protocols intend to bring an efficient routing functionality, their performance differ with the variation in network scenarios. This paper develops a more realistic simulation environment based on EXata simulator for performance assessment of three prominent protocols: AODV, DSR, and DYnamic MANET On-demand routing (DYMO). This assessment relying the measurement of evaluation metrics such as Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), end-to-end delay, throughput, and jitter tests the suitability of these routing protocols for adaption to different network scenarios viz. variation in the number of nodes and variation in the node speed. To analyze the performances of these protocols in adversarial environment, they are also tested under the varying number of attackers those are causing routing disruptions by acting as black holes and gray holes. The presented work certainly provides a pertinent reference for the selection of routing protocols for different application scenarios.