CBR Traffic Based Performance Investigations of DSDV, DSR and AODV Routing Protocols for MANET Using NS2

A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is selfconfiguring network of mobile nodes connected by wireless links to form an arbitrary topology without the use of existing infrastructure. This paper does the comparative investigations on the performance of routing protocols Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad-hoc On demand distance vector (AODV) and Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector (DSDV) for wireless adhoc networks in a simulated environment against varying parameters considering UDP as transport protocol and CBR as traffic generator. In this paper, we have studied the effects of varying node mobility rate, scalability and maximum speed on the performance of ad-hoc network routing protocols. Simulation results indicate that despite in most simulations reactive routing protocols DSR and AODV performed significantly better than proactive routing protocol DSDV, DSR is less scalable with respect to network size because DSR introduces high overheads with the increase in network size. Simulations presented clearly show that there is a need for routing protocol specifically tuned to the characteristics of adhoc networks.