The Microscopic Behavior of MANET Routing Protocols in Realistic Environments∗

This paper presents a microscopic analysis of MANET routing protocols’ behavior in realistic environments. The motivation of this study was due to our previous testbed experimentations where we found that AODV and DSDV’s performance did not match simulation results, primarily due to the use of a simple radio propagation model that did not take into account transient links caused by small-scale fading. Henceforth, we extended the ns-2 simulator with a realistic radio propagation model, that incorporated Rayleigh fading, to gain insights into the impact of transient links on AODV, DSR, and DSDV’s behaviour. Our simulation studies explain each protocol’s key behavior that leads to the following conclusions: (1) routing through stable routes is important, (2) hop count is the root cause of poor performance, (3) the 2-ray ground radio propagation model is inappropriate for simulating ad-hoc protocols in indoor environments, and (4) local recovery is important.