This document evaluates the performance of different MANET routing protocols under random walk mobility. It simulates AODV, DSR, OLSR, and ZRP using the OPNET simulator. The key metrics examined are throughput, retransmission attempts, network load, and media access delay. The results show that the hybrid ZRP protocol has the best overall performance in terms of throughput, retransmission attempts and network load. However, the proactive OLSR protocol performs best for media access delay since routes are predefined.

1. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONICS AND
International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering & Technology (IJECET), ISSN
0976 – 6464(Print), ISSN 0976 – 6472(Online) Volume 4, Issue 1, January- February (2013), © IAEME
COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY (IJECET)
ISSN 0976 – 6464(Print)
ISSN 0976 – 6472(Online)
Volume 4, Issue 1, January- February (2013), pp. 125-130
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EVALUATING THE PERFORMANCE OF MANET ROUTING
PROTOCOLS
Saloni Singla1, Tripatjot Singh Panag2
1
(Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, RIMT-IET, Fatehgarh Sahib,
Punjab, INDIA,singla.saloni@gmail.com)
2
(Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering ,Baba Banda Singh Bahadur
Engineering College, Fatehgarh Sahib, Punjab, INDIA, tripatjot.singh@bbsbec.ac.in)
ABSTRACT
A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self-constructing network of wireless devices
connected by wireless links without any infrastructure. Every device that is involved in a
MANET simulation is free to move independently in any direction of its choice. MANET
nodes mounted on moving vehicles, wearable devices & as personal medical devices are
showing significant applications in the field of ubiquitous healthcare. Performance of
MANETs largely depends upon the routing mechanism & nature of mobility. The aim of this
paper is to analyze the performance of various Manet routing protocols. Two reactive
protocols (AODV, DSR), a proactive protocol (OLSR), a hybrid protocol (ZRP) have been
evaluated by considering the Random walk mobility model. Simulations are carried out using
OPNET simulator to evaluate the performance on the basis of throughput, Media access
delay, and network load and retransmission attempts. Our experimental results show that ZRP
protocol has optimized results as compared to other protocols.
Keywords: AODV, DSR, MANET, OLSR, ZRP.
1. INTRODUCTION
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks are autonomous and decentralized wireless systems.
MANETs consist of mobile nodes that are free in moving in and out in the network. Nodes
are the systems or devices that are participating in the network. These nodes can act as
host/router or both at same time. These nodes have the ability to configure themselves and
because of their self-configuration ability, they can be deployed urgently without the need of
any infrastructure [1].That means the nodes themselves act as routers and new nodes can join,
and other nodes can leave the network [2]. There are a number of studies which looked at the
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2. International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering & Technology (IJECET), ISSN
0976 – 6464(Print), ISSN 0976 – 6472(Online) Volume 4, Issue 1, January- February (2013), © IAEME
evaluation of a number of MANET routing protocols. [3] Compared DSR and TORA in
OPNET where DSR performed better than TORA. The performance investigation of
reactive and proactive MANET routing protocols, namely AODV, DSR, TORA and
OLSR is done [4]. It has been concluded that with regards to overall performance, AODV
and OLSR performed pretty well. Effect of various mobility models on the performance
evaluation of MANET routing protocols is studied [5] and three random based mobility
models such as Random waypoint, Random walk and Random Directions were
implemented. Based on the observations, it is suggested that AODV routing protocol can
be used under high mobility since it outperforms DSDV, TORA and DSR
protocols.Various ad hoc routing protocols have their unique characteristics. Hence, in
order to find out the most adaptive and efficient routing protocol for the highly
dynamic topology in ad hoc networks, the routing protocols behavior has to be
analyzed using various metrics. Thus, the goal is to carry out a systematic
performance comparison of ad hoc routing protocols under Random walk mobility
model.
Paper is organized as follow: section 2 introduces the random walk mobility model.
Section 3 discusses the routing protocols used in the analysis. Section 4 describes the
performance metrics. Simulation parameters, results and discussions are given in section
5 and finally section 6 presents the conclusion.
2. RANDOM WALK MOBILITY MODEL
In this mobility model, an MN moves from its current location to a new location
by randomly choosing a direction and speed in which to travel. The new speed and
direction are both chosen from pre-defined ranges, [speedmin, speedmax] and [0,2π]
respectively [5]. Each movement in the Random Walk Mobility Model occurs in either a
constant time interval t or a constant distance traveled d, at the end of which a new
direction and speed are calculated. If an MN which moves according to this model
reaches a simulation boundary, it “bounces” off the simulation border with an angle
determined by the incoming direction. The MN then continues along this new path.
3. ROUTING PROTOCOLS
Routing is the act of moving information from a source to a destination in an
internetwork. Routing protocols use several metrics to calculate the best path for routing
the packets to its destination. Routing is mainly classified into static routing and dynamic
routing [6] and further classified into three major categories as proactive, reactive and
hybrid protocols. Proactive or table-driven protocols attempt to maintain consistent up-to-
date routing information from each node to every other node in the network. Reactive or
on demand protocols creates routes only when a node requires a route to a destination, it
initiates a route discovery process, which ends when the route is found. Hybrid Routing
[7][8] Protocols combine proactive protocols with reactive protocols. Temporary Ordered
Routing Algorithm (TORA), Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) are the examples of Hybrid
Protocols.
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3. International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering & Technology (IJECET), ISSN
0976 – 6464(Print), ISSN 0976 – 6472(Online) Volume 4, Issue 1, January- February (2013), © IAEME
3.1 AODV: The Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector routing protocol is a reactive
protocol based upon the distance vector algorithm. Whenever a node wants to try and
find a route to another node it broadcasts a Route Re-quest (RREQ) to all its
neighbors[9]. The RREQ propagates through the network until it reaches the
destination or the node with a fresh enough route to the destination. Then the route
is made available by uncasing a RREP back to the source.
3.2 DSR: Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) belongs to the class of reactive protocols and
allows to dynamically discovering a route across multiple network hops to any
destination. DSR uses no periodic routing of messages, thereby reducing network
bandwidth overhead, conserving battery power and avoiding large routing updates
throughout the ad-hoc network [5].
3.3 OLSR: Optimized Link State routing is a proactive link-state routing protocol, in
which routes to all destinations within the network are known and maintained before use.
Having the routes available within the standard routing table can be useful for some
systems and network applications as there is no route discovery delay associated with
finding a new route. The routing overhead generated, while generally greater than that of
a reactive protocol, does not increase with the number of routes being used.
3.4 ZRP: The Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) combines the advantages of both reactive and
pro-active protocols into a hybrid scheme, taking advantage of pro-active discovery
within a node's local neighborhood, and using a reactive protocol for communication
between these neighborhoods.
4. PERFORMANCE METRICS
The following performance metrics have been chosen to evaluate the performance.
4.1 Throughput (bits/sec): This represents the total number of bits (in bits/sec) forwarded
from wireless LAN layers to higher layers in all WLAN nodes of the network. It is the
number of packets passing through the network in a unit of time.
4.2 Media Access Delay (sec): When a packet is generated by a node, it takes some time
to place it on the transmission media. Media Access Delay is a time taken by a node to
place a packet on the transmission carrier
4.3 Network Load (bits/sec): This statistic represents the total data traffic (in bits/sec)
received by the entire WLAN BSS from the higher layers of the MACs that is accepted
and queued for transmission.
4.4 Retransmission Attempts (packets): Total number of retransmission attempts by all
WLAN MACs in the network until either the packet is successfully transmitted or it is
discarded as a result of reaching short or low retry limit.
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4. International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering & Technology (IJECET), ISSN
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5. SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT
In this section Simulations carried out by the OPNET [10] are presented .OPNET is
an Object Oriented environment that is most powerful general purpose network simulator.
5.1 Simulation parameters: Table 1 gives the wireless LAN simulation parameters:
TABLE 1: Wireless LAN Parameters
parameter Value parameter value
Simulation time 60 min (3600 s) Packet size 2048 bits
Terrain area 1000 x 1000 m2 Fragmentation 1024 bits
threshold
Number of nodes 20 Routing protocols AODV,DSR,ZRP, OLSR
Traffic type FTP Node placement Random
5.2 Simulation Results
5.2.1 Throughput: Simulation results in Fig. 1 show that ZRP gives the highest throughput
because of its hybrid nature. For the neighbor nodes, ZRP act as a reactive protocol and for
the nodes other than the neighbor nodes, it works like the proactive protocol. AODV and
DSR shows the least throughput because of their reactive nature in random walk since for this
model, mobility is high and thus has to send more control packets to cache roots. Proactive
protocol OLSR performs better than reactive protocol since it has prior routing tables and can
send more data packets in unit time.
5.2.2 Retransmission attempts: In Random walk mobility model all the nodes move
vigorously so the performance of OLSR degrades or has the max average retransmission
attempts. It is seen that the performance of AODV is also worse since it has to find the routes
on demand. Each time nodes have to create routes to send data packets and most of the time
the timer (TTL) associated with each packet gets expired during the route creation. So the
node has to make another attempt to send the same packet. Although being reactive protocol,
as shown in Fig.2 DSR has less retransmission attempts as compared to AODV because it has
a route maintenance mechanism in case of link failure and thus the no of attempts to send
packets is reduced. ZRP outperforms all the protocols because of its hybrid nature since every
node has a route cache.
5.2.3 Network Load: It has been seen that the hybrid protocol such that ZRP gives the
maximum network load as shown in Fig. 3. ZRP protocol is able to deliver more data packets
to the destination than any other protocol due to its hybrid nature. Rest of the protocols such
as AODV, OLSR and DSR are outperformed by ZRP protocol.
5.2.4 Media access Delay: Fig. 4 depicts that OLSR, as it is a proactive protocol the routes
are predefined so it takes least time to place the packets on to the medium. AODV being a
reactive protocol possess higher delay than OLSR due to reinitializing the route flooding
process every time while discovering new routes and determining changes in topology.
Similarly DSR experiences even higher average delay as compared to AODV. ZRP being
hybrid in nature stood in the middle of both reactive and proactive protocols
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5. International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering & Technology (IJECET), ISSN
0976 – 6464(Print), ISSN 0976 – 6472(Online) Volume 4, Issue 1, January- February (2013), © IAEME
Figure 1: Throughput Figure 2: Retransmission attempts
Figure 3: Network load Figure 4: Media access delay
6. CONCLUSION
This paper studied the performance of the four widely used MANET routing protocols
(AODV, DSR, OLSR, and ZRP) for Random walk mobility model. Results indicate that the
Hybrid protocol ZRP outperforms other protocols considering throughput, Retransmission
attempts and network load. Taking into account Media access delay proactive protocol
performs better than other protocols. Thus when delay is to be a minimized proactive
protocol can be used.
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