Performance Evaluation and Comparison of On-Demand Routing Protocols for Ad Hoc Networks: DSR, AODV, AOMDV, TORA

Routing in mobile ad-hoc networks is an integral aspect of communication between devices. Routing is considered to be a challenging task in MANETs due to the drastic and unpredictable changes in network topologies as a result of the random and frequent movement of the nodes and due to the absence of any centralized control. Several routing protocols have been designed and developed to perform under various network environments. In this work a systematic simulation based performance study of the four prominent routing protocols: Ad hoc on Demand Multipath Routing Distance Vector (AOMDV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Temporarily Ordered Routing (TORA) protocols in the simulated networking environment under varying number of nodes in various scenarios is performed. These protocols use on-demand routing and have different protocol mechanisms leading to differences in performance. The performance is analyzed and evaluated based on end to end delay, packet delivery ratio, routing overheads and through-put done by varying network load, and the size of the network. Based on the observations, we make recommendations about the performance of the protocols.