Performance Evaluation of Routing Protocols in MANETs using Varying Number of Nodes and Different Metrics

This work evaluates the performance of three well known routing protocols in mobile ad-hoc networks, namely Ad-hoc On demand Distance Vector Protocol (AODV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA). Two scenarios were created using OPNET and extensive simulations were made on each scenario to evaluate the performance of the three protocols. Results were presented as a function of three performance metrics namely: throughput, delay and network load. In most simulations and overall, DSR and AODV performed better than TORA while DSR shows a better performance compare to AODV. In terms of throughput, DSR is better than any of the other two protocols for both scenarios while AODV shows a better result in delay than DSR and TORA. The lowest value of network load is generated in both scenarios when TORA is used than when any of DSR and AODV is used. Thus, DSR because of its highest value of throughput outperformed others, followed by AODV and then TORA.