Routing strategies for wireless ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Mobile Ad hoc network (MANET) lacks of centralized control and infrastructure that is an autonomous system of mobile node that can communicate with each other using wireless link. Every node in MANET acts as host and router. Since the node can move, the network topology will change frequently. In MANET, the bandwidth and transmission rate is limited. Therefore, the overhead of the routing must be minimized. The optimal routing protocol must be use to reduce the routing overhead and improve the performance of the network. In MANET, there are a lot of routing protocols. In the project, three protocols Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR) were simulated using OPNET Modeler Suite. The performance of three protocols were compared in terms of end-to-end delay, routing overhead and packet delivery ratio in varying number of network size and speed with fading and ideal case. Stimulation result shows that DSR is suitable in small size network and AODV and OLSR were preferred in large size or high mobility network.