Performance Analysis of Mobile Ad-Hoc Routing Protocols by Varying Mobility, Speed and Network Load

Authors

Nilotpal Sarmah, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

Summer 7-30-2014

Document Type

Article

Citation

N.Sarmah, Y. Yang, H. Sharif, Y. Qian, "Performance Analysis of Mobile Ad-Hoc Routing Protocols By Varying Mobility, Speed And Network Load", Masters Thesis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, July 2014

Comments

A THESIS Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Master of Science, Major: Telecommunications Engineering, Under the Supervision of Professor Yaoqing Yang. Lincoln, Nebraska: August, 2014

Copyright (c) 2014 Nilotpal Dev Sarmah

Abstract

One of the most promising network that has emerged from the technology world is the mobile ad-hoc network or MANET. It is a type of multi-hop network. Wireless by nature, MANETs do not have a specific network infrastructure. It is a collection of wireless mobile devices that communicate with each other without the help of any third party backbone like a base-station or a router. It can be hard to imagine how every node in this type of network communicate with one another without having a router. In MANETs, nodes change locations with time, configure themselves and get the information transmitted from source to destination without the help of any router or base station. Hence, for efficient data transmission, it is critical to understand the type of routing that is being used by these networks. Since they have no specific routers to handle these tasks, it can be a monumental task for the nodes to efficiently determine a path to forward and route their packets when they are at constant motion. This research makes a comprehensive performance analysis of the various mobile ad-hoc routing protocols. Over 160 simulation scenarios have been conducted and as many as 6 performance parameters are analyzed and compared in three different scales of network to make it a comprehensive analysis.

Significant work is done in this area for more than a decade and researchers around the world have come up with a wide range of results. In this research, the results from previous work are taken into account for comparison and a wide analysis is made to carve out the most efficient routing algorithm under various mobility scenarios. All the major proactive and reactive routing protocols viz. Destination sequenced distance vector (DSDV), Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocols are compared in three different phases - mobility, speed and network load. Simulation results show that dynamic source routing protocol (DSR) performs the best in small networks while ad-hoc on demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol performs the best in medium and large networks. Although OLSR fails to cope with the level of AODV, it can be a superior protocol having demonstrated comparable performance to AODV and its proactive nature of routing packets.

Adviser: Yaoqing Yang