Analysis of routing protocol performance on Multi-Hop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Multi-Hop Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks are characterized by dynamic and frequently changing topologies, bandwidth constrained variable capacity links and energy-constrained operation. Nodes in such a network are usually laptops or hand held personal digital assistants (PDA), which have limited resources like batten, power, CPU power, storage capacity, and transmission range. Internet Protocol (IP) based routing protocols are not suitable for these types of networks as they, rely either on periodic updates or require stable topologies for efficient routing. The objective for this paper is to evaluate proposed routing protocols for MH-WANET based on performance. This evaluation should be done theoretically and through simulation. The goal of this paper is to present useful insight in proposed routing protocols for Multi-Hop Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks through the means of theoretical and simulation based study. The simulation environment is based on a Network Simulator 2 from Berkeley with wireless extension provided by Monarch group at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).