Comparison of Proactive, Reactive, and Hybrid Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

An ad hoc network is a collection of mobile wireless nodes that form a temporary network dynamically without using any existing network infrastructure or centralised administration. A mobile node may act as both a host and a router to forward packets to other mobile nodes on the network in such a scenario. Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV), Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV), and Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) are commonly used protocols in mobile ad hoc networks for proactive routing, reactive routing, and hybrid routing respectively. In this paper, we compare the performance of these three protocols using a random waypoint mobility model for mobile ad hoc networks. In order to experimentally evaluate the performance of the protocols, we deployed the protocols DSDV, AODV, and ZRP in a simulated experimental setup using the simulator NS version 2.35. We evaluated the performance differentials on the simulation areas such as 600 x 600 m2, 800 x 800 m2, and 1000 x 1000 m2 for low and high mobiles nodes between 10 and 60 nodes. We used end-to-end delay between two nodes, throughput of a node over a network, and packet transmission ratio as the performance metrics for our evaluation. Our experimental results show that the performance of DSDV is better than both AODV and ZRP when the number of nodes is limited. However, with the large - mobility scenarios and the hybrid routing protocol ZRP has an average performance.