Performance evaluation of routing protocols for ad hoc wireless networks

A mobile ad hoc network is a collection of autonomous mobile nodes that communicate with each other over wireless links. Such networks are expected to play an increasingly important role in future civilian and military settings, being useful for providing communication support where no fixed infrastructure exists or the deployment of a fixed infrastructure is not economically profitable and movement of communicating parties is possible. However, since there is no stationary infrastructure such as base stations, mobile hosts need to operate as routers in order to maintain the information about the network connectivity. Therefore, a number of routing protocols have been proposed for ad hoc wireless networks. In this paper, we study and compare the performance of the following routing protocols AODV, PAODV (preemptive AODV), CBRP, DSR, and DSDV. A variety of workload and scenarios, as characterized by mobility, load and size of the ad hoc network were simulated. Our results indicate that despite its improvement in reducing route request packets, CBRP has a higher overhead than DSR because of its periodic hello messages while AODV's end-to-end packet delay is the shortest when compared to DSR and CBRP. PAODV has shown little improvements over AODV.