Performance Evaluation of Important Ad Hoc Network Protocols

Abstract

A wireless ad hoc network is a collection of specific infrastructureless mobile nodes forming a temporary network without any centralized administration. A user can move anytime in an ad hoc scenario and, as a result, such a network needs to have routing protocols which can adopt dynamically changing topology. To accomplish this, a number of ad hoc routing protocols have been proposed and implemented, which include dynamic source routing (DSR), ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing, and temporally ordered routing algorithm (TORA). Although considerable amount of simulation work has been done to measure the performance of these routing protocols, due to the constant changing nature of these protocols, a new performance evaluation is essential. Accordingly, in this paper, we analyze the performance differentials to compare the above-mentioned commonly used ad hoc network routing protocols. We also analyzed the performance over varying loads for each of these protocols using OPNET Modeler 10.5. Our findings show that for specific differentials, TORA shows better performance over the two on-demand protocols, that is, DSR and AODV. Our findings are expected to lead to further performance improvements of various ad hoc networks in the future.