Performance Comparison Of MANET Routing Protocols In Different Network Sizes

A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary network without using any centralized access point, infrastructure, or centralized administration. To establish a data transmission between two nodes, typically multiple hops are required due to the limited transmission range. Mobility of the different nodes makes the situation even more complicated. Multiple routing protocols especially for these conditions have been developed during the last years, to find optimized routes from a source to some destination. The scope of this project was to test routing performance of four different routing protocols (AODV, DSR, LAR 1 and ZRP) in variable network sizes up to thousand nodes. We have used QualNet Simulator from Scalable Networks to perform the simulations. This paper describes the different routing protocols, the simulator and the experiment setup and finally presents and discusses the results.