Performance Analysis and Comparison of Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Mobile Ad Hoc network (MANET) is a typical self-organizing network, in which the routing mechanism should adapt rapidly to the frequently changing network topology, which remains hot for research. The article described the features of Destination-Sequence Distance Vector (DSDV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Ad Hoc On-Demand Multi-path Distance Vector (AOMDV), examined the effect of dynamic change in network topology on the performance of these routing protocols based on packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay and normalized routing load with NS2 network simulation software. The experiment results show that DSDV protocol is not suitable for frequently changed network, while DSR and AODV can primely adapt to the dynamic change of network topology. The performance of AOMDV is unsatisfactory and therefore some suggestions for improvement are presented.