A Comprehensive Performance Analysis of Proactive, Reactive and Hybrid MANETs Routing Protocols

A mobile Ad-hoc network (MANET) is a dynamic multi hop wireless network established by a group of nodes in which there is no central administration. Due to mobility of nodes and dynamic network topology, the routing is one of the most important challenges in ad-hoc networks. Several routing algorithms for MANETs have been proposed by the researchers which have been classified into various categories, however, the most prominent categories are proactive, reactive and hybrid. The performance comparison of routing protocols for MANETs has been presented by other researcher also, however, none of these works considers proactive, reactive and hybrid protocols together. In this paper, the performance of proactive (DSDV), reactive (DSR and AODV) and hybrid (ZRP) routing protocols has been compared. The performance differentials are analyzed on the basis of throughput, average delay, routing overhead and number of packets dropped with a variation of number of nodes, pause time and mobility.