Comparative Performance Analysis of AODV,DSR, TORA and OLSR Routing Protocols in MANET Using OPNET

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are receiving a significant interest and are becoming very popular in the world of wireless networks and telecommunication. MANETs consist of mobile nodes which can communicate with each other without any infrastructure or centralized administration. In MANETs, the movement of nodes is unpredictable and complex; thus making the routing of the packets challenging. As a result, routing protocols play an important role in managing the formation, configuration, and maintenance of the topology of the network. A lot of routing protocols have been proposed as well as compared in the literature. However, most of the work done on the performance evaluation of routing protocols is done using the Constant Bit Rate traffic. This paper involves the evaluation of MANETs routing protocols such as Ad hoc on Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Temporary Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA), and Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) using Http Image Browsing traffic. The performance metrics used for the evaluation of these routing protocols are delay and throughput as a function of the load. The overall results show that the proactive routing protocol (AODV) performs better in terms of delay and throughput .