A Quantitative Analysis and Behavioral Study of Routing Protocols in MANET

In this paper, we have performed a comparative analysis on three different MANET protocols with respect to packet delivery ratio (PDR), throughput, average end-to-end delay, routing overhead, normalized routing load (NRL), packet drop and packet loss metrics. The protocols considered are DSR, AODV and DSDV. The first two protocols fall under reactive whereas the third one is a proactive protocol. The performance differentials of the routing protocols are analyzed using NS-2.35 simulator. The simulation has been conducted with 100 numbers of mobile nodes (MNs) for constant bit rate (CBR) traffic and random waypoint mobility model with respect to varying pause time. Simulation analysis indicates that both reactive protocols perform quite similar in terms of throughput. However, DSR outperforms in terms of packet delivery ratio, routing overhead, normalized routing load, packet loss and packet drop than AODV. On the other hand, DSDV exhibits considerably less end-to-end delay among all the protocols due to its table-driven characteristics. Keywords— AODV, CBR, DSR, DSDV, Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), Mobile Nodes (MNs), Routing Protocols, Routing Table