Performance analysis of reactive routing protocols in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are self-organized infrastructure-less networks, including wireless mobile systems, which have been thoroughly studied and widely used in a variety of applications. Routing mechanisms in MANETs are considered as a major research challenge due to the nature of the network topology, where the nodes are able to move in any direction in the network showing unpredictable behavior. Nodes failures and absence of centralized coordinators are also important challenges in such network configurations. In addition, the routing protocols that are usually exploited in MANETs are characterized as proactive (Table-driven) and reactive (On-demand). In this context, this paper elaborates on a preliminary comparison study among different reactive protocols, such as the Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) and the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR). This comparison was conducted towards investigating the optimum exploitation of such routing protocols in MANETs, in terms of their performance against the number of the nodes in the network.