Comparative Study of Routing Protocol Performance in Mobile Ad hoc Network

Abstract

Over the decades amazing progress has been observed in the world of wireless and mobile communication that ushers in the era in which laptops, smartphones and sensors have become pervasive, inexpensive and rapidly available. Due to the high mobility and dynamic nature of the network finding an effective and efficient routing protocol for a particular scenario is often a challenge. This paper basically focuses on the comparative study of the performance of the routing protocols (Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Optimized Link State Routing(OLSR)) using OPNET (Optimized Network Engineering Tool). Four scenarios were created, and each scenario with different nodes and run on three application services (HTTP, FTP and Video conferencing). The performance of the protocols was compared based on certain metrics (Throughput, end-to-end Delay, Load). The simulation results show that the AODV on the average performed better than OLSR and DSR, but OLSR will be preferred for real-time application and higher number of connected nodes in a MANET system.