ABSTRACT
Wireless medium. dynamic infrastructure and frequent mobility make the
communication challenging among nodes of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANE:rs).
Routing protocols play a pivotal role to facilitate energy-efficient, reliable and robust
communication in MANE Ts where the nodes mostly have limited resources. The main
target of a MANET routing protocol is to provide the path among nodes that should be
accurate and efftcient and the route discovery and maintenance processes should incur
less energy, packet delay and overhead.
Several MANET routing protocols have been proposed over the years in order to
achieve different application-specific objectives. This thesis presents a comparative
analysis of three most popular MANET routing protocols, namely, Ad-hoc On Demand
Distance Vector (AODV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Destination Sequenced
Distance Vector (DSDV) protocols. These protocols are evaluated under different
network sizes. topologies and mobility models and with varying tramc conditions and
against several network parameters including packet delivery ratio, packet transmission.
energy consumption, packet delay and throughput. The intensive experiment results that
have achieved under the OMNeT++ platform show that AODV protocol, in general,
outperforms the other two protocols for most of the parameters for the various network
scenarios.
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