QoS Based Performance Metric Comparison and Analysis of Ad Hoc Routing Protocols in MANETs

An ad hoc wireless network consists of a set of mobile nodes that are connected by wireless links. The network topology in such a network may keep changing randomly. Routing protocols that find a path from a source node to a destination node used in traditional wired networks cannot be directly applied in ad hoc wireless networks due to their highly dynamic topology and absence of established infrastructure for centralized administration. A variety of routing protocols for ad hoc wireless networks has been proposed in the recent past. An efficient routing protocol can provide significant benefits to mobile ad hoc networks in terms of both performance and reliability. The most popular routing protocols are Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV), Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA) and Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) routing protocol. The performance of AODV and DSDV routing protocol have been evaluated for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) in terms of the quality of service metrics: "throughput", "average end-to-end delay" and observed that the AODV is performing better than the DSDV routing protocol. A network simulator-2 (NS-2) has been used for the performance evaluation of AODV and DSDV routing protocol in this paper.