Comparative Study of Different Routing Protocols in MANET Based on Simulation Using Ns-2

A mobile ad hoc network is a collection of autonomous mobile nodes that communicate with each other over wireless links. Such networks are expected to play increasingly important role in future civilian and military settings, being useful for providing communication support where no fixed infrastructure exists or the deployment of a fixed infrastructure is not economically profitable and movement of communicating parties is possible. However, since there is no stationary infrastructure such as base stations, mobile hosts need to operate as routers in order to maintain the information about the network connectivity. Therefore, in recent years, a variety of routing protocols have been proposed and several of these have been already extensively simulated or implemented as well. This paper evaluates performance of two routing protocols, Ad hoc On-demand Multi-path Distance Vector (AOMDV) and Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) routing protocols. We perform the analysis on two different performance metrics Average delay and Packet Delivery Ratio using Load Model and Flow Model. Simulation is carried out using Ns-2.34.