Effect of Node Transition Probability Based Routing Protocol on Media Access Control Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we study the effect of routing protocols on the performance of Media Access Control (MAC) protocols in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET). Three well known MAC protocols such as 802.11, Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) and Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (MACA) are considered for performance study. The main focus of this paper was to study how the Node Transition Probability based Routing protocols, which was proposed by us, affect the performance of the MAC protocols when the underlying network and traffic parameters are varied. The performance of the protocols was measured with respect to number of packets received, average delay of each packet, throughput and number of control packets. The experimental analysis was carried out using GloMosim simulator. Our results shows that the performance of Node Transition Probability based Routing (NTPR) under different MAC protocol tends to vary and performs better under IEEE 802.11. Finally, we conclude by saying this observation also emphasizes the critical need for studying interactions between protocol layers when designing wireless networks protocols.