Comparative Analysis of Reactive, Proactive and Hybrid Routing Protocols in MANET

The performance of routing protocols in Mobile Ad hoc network (MANET) always attracts many attentions. As many previous works have shown, routing performance is greatly dependent to the availability and stability of wireless links. Although there are some studies reported to evaluate the performance of routing protocols in MANET, little work is done for the system overall performance, which is generally referred to as the network throughput, delay and network load. MANET is a self organized and self configurable network where the mobile nodes move arbitrarily. Routing is a critical issue in MANET and hence the focus of this paper along with the performance analysis of routing protocols. We compared three routing protocols i.e. AODV, OLSR and GRP. Our simulation tool will be OPNET modeler. The performance of these routing protocols is analyzed by three metrics: delay, network load and throughput. All the three routing protocols are explained in a deep way with metrics. The comparison analysis will be carrying out about these protocols and in the last the conclusion will be presented, that which routing protocol is the best one for mobile ad hoc networks. The final evaluation is presented at the end of this paper. Keywords— MANET, AODV, OLSR,GRP, OPNET, Routing Protocols.