Network Performance Evaluation of Different MANET Routing Protocols Configured on Heterogeneous Nodes

Abstract

The recent communication technology tends to be wirelessly for the mobility reason. Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) can be established without any infrastructure or centralized controller. It can be constructed quickly in rural areas, military zones, and in emergency cases like earthquake. Three different types of routing protocols were categorized according to their work's nature, which are Proactive, Reactive and Hybrid routing protocols. Due to the mobility characteristic of MANET nodes, routing protocols play important role in determining the network efficiency where the network topology is changed frequently. Many studies are conducted to analyze network performance and specify the best routing protocol using different simulation tools. In this paper, the performance of network is analyzed and evaluated when heterogeneous nodes are configured with these three types of protocols under heavy traffic load (VOIP). The result of our simulation shows that OLSR protocol has the highest throughput among others while DSR protocol shows the best performance in terms of Network load. Generally, the performance of routing protocol differs depending on the network type and use.