Optimising VoIP Traffic over MANET: Leveraging the Power of TORA On-Demand Routing Protocol

Abstract

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) routing protocols studies in the last decade have focused more on proactive routing protocols with many specifics to data traffic. Only fewer works have addressed the issues of reactive protocols supporting voice application. This research work analyses the performance of VoIP application in MANET configured with Temporary Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA) routing protocol as on-demand routing protocol. The VoIP application is evaluated using four different parameters namely; codec, MAC protocol, mobility and node density in an OPNET simulation environment. The quality of transmission was measured through different performance metrics such as jitter, Mean Opinion Score (MOS), end-to-end delay and throughput. Results show that major metrics that had high impact on the performance of the network included mobility and node density. It research proved that communication in an ad hoc network using TORA is more productive and effective with fewer nodes. It could also be said that given the utilization of TORA routing protocol in MANET, quality of voice communication is disproportionate to node density. Increase in the number of nodes greatly depreciates voice quality. In the whole, the work provides a very good analysis that could help the academia and industries in reaching decisions for a most suiting routing protocol at any given ad hoc voice communication setup.