Simulation Based Performance Comparison of Various Routing Protocols in MANET Using Network Simulation Tool

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a network temporarily without any centralized administration of the mobile networks. Each node in MANET moves arbitrarily making the multi-hop network topology to change randomly at unpredictable times. Two nodes in such a network can communicate in a bidirectional manner if and only if the distance between them is at most the minimum of their transmission ranges. When a node wants to communicate with a node outside its transmission range, a multi-hop routing strategy is used which involves some intermediate nodes? Because of the movements of nodes, there is a constant possibility of topology change in MANET. There are several familiar routing protocols like DSDV, AODV, DSR, etc., Which have been proposed for providing communication among all the nodes in the network? This paper presents a performance comparison of proactive and reactive protocols AODV, DSDV and DSR based on metrics such as throughput, packet delivery ratio and average end-to-end delay by using the NS-2 simulator.