Performance evaluation of MANET routing protocols in a maritime environment

DSDV (Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector), AODV (Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector), AOMDV (Ad hoc On-Demand Multipath Distance Vector) and DSR (Dynamic Source Routing) are among the most widely used routing protocols in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) due to their compatibility with multi hop routing environments and scalability towards increased traffic and mobility. On the other hand due to the differences in the routing schemes where DSDV is a table driven routing scheme and AODV, AOMDV and DSR are on-demand routing schemes, each routing protocol has its advantages and disadvantages. In this paper we investigate the performance of these routing protocols in Ship Ad-hoc Networks (SANET) in a maritime environment where ships communicate using Very High Frequency (VHF) as the physical layer. A mobile ad-hoc network is achieved so that ships can use it to share data networking facilities or to send particular sensor data such as sea depth, temperature, wind speed and direction, etc. to a central server to produce a public information map.