Performance Evaluation of Ad-hoc Routing Protocols

A wireless ad hoc network is a decentralized wireless network. The network is ad hoc because it does not rely on a preexisting infrastructure, such as routers in wired networks or access points in managed (infrastructure) wireless networks. Instead, each node participates in routing by forwarding data for other nodes, and so the determination of which nodes forward data is made dynamically based on the network connectivity. Routing protocols plays the important role for the resource requirement for routing. Mobility and scalability has become the crucial parameters for today's ad-hoc network.Objective of this paper is to study various ad-hoc routing protocols and evaluate their performance in terms of scalability and mobility using various performance metrics such as packet loss, throughput, and jitter so as to decide the usability of these protocols. The protocols under comparison are Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector Protocol (AODV), Destination Sequence Distance Vector Protocol (DSDV) and Dynamic Source Routing Protocol (DSR). Result shows that AODV performas better than the other two protocols with varying number of nodes and mobility.