Source routing in Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs)

Mobile ad hoc network is a reconfigurable network of mobile nodes connected by multi-hop wireless links and capable of operating without any fixed infrastructure support. In order to facilitate communication within such self-creating, self-organizing and selfadministrating network, a dynamic routing protocol is needed. The primary goal of such an ad hoc network routing protocol is to discover and establish a correct and efficient route between a pair of nodes so that messages may be delivered in a timely manner. Route construction should be done with a minimum of overhead and bandwidth consumption. This paper examines two routing protocols, both on-demand source routing, for mobile ad hoc networks– the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), an flat architecture based and the Cluster Based Routing Protocol (CBRP), a cluster architecture based and evaluates both routing protocols in terms of packet delivery fraction, normalized routing load, average end to end delay, throughput by varying number of nodes per sq. km, traffic sources and mobility. Simulation results show that in high mobility (pause time 0s) scenarios, CBRP outperforms DSR. CBRP scales well with increasing number of nodes.