Routing Strategies for Wireless Ad Hoc Network

Abstract

In Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), all mobile nodes are connected dynamically in arbitrary manners with no fixed infrastructure. MANETs have no fixed routers and all nodes can act as stations or routers to help maintaining efficient routing in the network. The nodes are connected wirelessly. As the nodes move at certain speed, the frequent or rapid topology change may affect the performance of the network. Therefore, lots of MANET routing protocols were designed to fit different network environments. In this project, performances of two reactive routing protocols and one proactive routing protocol were studied. Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) are reactive, while Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) is proactive. AODV, DSR and OLSR were simulated using FTP traffic in OPNET Modeler 14.5. Analyses of performances were presented based on simulation results in packet end-to-end delay, routing overheads, packet delivery ratio and throughput. It is found that OLSR outperforms AODV and DSR with lower packet end-to-end delay and higher throughput, but the gains are achieved at the cost of higher routing overhead, which may cause bandwidth wastage for large-scale networks. With limited bandwidth, AODV and DSR are good alternatives as they have low routing overhead. AODV performs slightly better than DSR in terms of packet end-to-end delay and throughput. It shows a tradeoff between efficient routing and routing overhead.