Unicast based reactive & proactive routing simulation in MANET: A comparative study for protocols in mobility scenarios

Abstract

A challenging issue for Ad-Hoc network is finding an effective routing mechanism, the wireless connection must have the capability to interact while traveling randomly. Although MANETs are self-configuring mobile node networks, the mobility of the nodes imposes some limitations on the power capacity of the nodes and thus on the transmission ranges. Many studies have investigated the protocols of Ad-Hoc networks, but this study has made a comprehensive investigation by using different scenarios among the studied protocols, particularly (DSR), (AODV) and (DSDV). The different numbers of deployed nodes with a mobile target node in the network have been analyzed with various important metrics such as; Generated, sent and received packet, lost and discarded packets, throughput, and the end to end latency with different packet sizes. Simulations are carried out in the simulation environment (NS2), and several comparisons were made among different metrics and scenarios by using different utilities. The results obtained showed interesting findings particularly when the scenario became more complex and the number of nodes increased. The number of packets received decreases by the mobile target node with the increasing number of nodes in the network. AODV showed better efficiency than the DSR and table-based DSDV protocol especially when a large number of nodes deployed. Furthermore, the average of the received packets to the sent packet ratio decreases proportionally as the number of nodes increases while the average end-to-end delay increases with the increasing number of nodes.