Scalability study of ad-hoc wireless mobile network routing protocol in sparse and dense networks

Ad-hoc wireless mobile network is formed by multiple mobile nodes connected to each other requiring no access point. Every mobile node is a host as well as a router. Nodes are able to communicate with neighboring nodes either one hop away or a few hops away from the source node. In order to allow the pair of nodes that are a few hops away to communicate, the data is relayed through intermediate nodes. As the network size grows, the performance of the transmission will be degraded due to network congestion and network splitting. The density and the mobility factors may influence the scalability of the ad hoc routing protocols. This paper investigates the scalability of the ad hoc routing protocols towards sparse networks, dense networks and combination of sparse and dense networks. Two different categories of ad-hoc wireless networks is used to evaluate how scalable they are for various scenarios. By using Network Simulator (ns-2), simulation of two selected routing protocols DSDV and AODV is conducted to analyze the factors that cause the routing performance to degrade in large-scale networks.