Conceptual analysis of single and multiple path routing in MANET network

Mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) has attracted the attention of networking industries owning to their desirable characteristics such as multi-hop routing, self-configuration, self-healing, self-managing, reliability, and scalability. Routing over wireless mobile networks is a critical problem due to the dynamic nature of the link qualities, even when nodes are static. A key challenge in MANETs is the need for an efficient routing protocol that establishes a route according to certain performance metrics related to the link quality. The routing issue in MANETs is generally concerned with finding a good path between the source and the destination pairs. Based on that, there is a demand for the development of a high throughput routing protocol. The impact of a single-path routing protocol and a multi path routing protocol on the performance of MANETs is required to be investigated. In this work, a performance comparison in terms of throughput, packet delivery, routing overhead, and end to end delay of well-known routing protocols such as AODV, AOMDV, and OLSR using network simulator version 2 (NS-2) has been introduced. The simulation results of this work show that the single-path AODV protocol out performance the multi path OLSR and AOMDV protocols in terms of throughput and packet delivery ratio. In addition to that, the single-path routing protocol presents less routing overhead in comparison to the AOMDV and OLSR. While the OLSR and AOMDV demonstrate a relatively better end to end delay in comparison to the AODV protocol.