Exploring the Performance Tradeoffs among Stability-Oriented Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

In this paper, we present an extensive ns-2 simulation based performance comparison of three widely known stability-oriented on-demand MANET routing protocols: Associativity-Based Routing (ABR) protocol, Flow-Oriented Routing Protocol (FORP) and Route Assessment Based Routing (RABR) protocol. Our simulations show that FORP routes are more stable than RABR routes, which are more stable than ABR routes. This also results in an increased packet delivery ratio for FORP in comparison to that of RABR and ABR. On the other hand, based on the energy consumed per packet and the average energy used per node, ABR is better than RABR, which is better than FORP. At low network density and mobility, ABR routes incur the lowest delay and as the network density and node mobility increases, RABR incurs lower delay. FORP incurs the highest delay under all conditions. Thus, we see a stability-delay-energy consumption tradeoff among these three stability-oriented routing protocols. Regarding the fairness of node usage, we observe that routes get distributed more evenly with increase in the node mobility and network density. But, still there is an appreciable variation in the energy consumption per node as only the chain of nodes that form stable routes are exhausted to a greater extent.