Comparative study and performance investigation of MANET routing protocols

MANETs (Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks) are fast-developing networks that gaining popularity in the recent period. They play an important part in a variety of applications, and as a result, they got a lot of attention. Routing remains a challenging problem in a MANET since it lacks infrastructure due to its self-configuration nature in addition to the frequent changes in topology due to node mobility. The requirement in MANET routing protocols is to send and receive information among the nodes with the best route with lower delay. Routing protocols are responsible for the efficient delivery of messages between mobile nodes with a focus on the use of limited resources. This paper investigates a group of the most prominent routing protocols of MANET and compares their performance in regard to different parameters such as (end-to-end delay, throughput, average jitter, and routing overhead). The protocols' performance is evaluated under different operating conditions, such as the terrain size that reflect different node density for various terrain dimensions. The amount of data exchanged is varied also through varying the number of bit-rate connections for the same network size. Results of the developed scenarios for the investigated protocols with the considered parameters are collected with the aid of the QualNet v5.2 network simulator.