Performance Analysis of On-Demand Routing Protocols in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have recently gained a lot of popularity due to their rapid dep-loyment and instant communication capabilities. WMNs are dynamically self-organizing, self-configuring and self-healing with the nodes in the network automatically establishing an adiej hoc network and preserving the mesh connectivity. Designing a routing protocol for WMNs re-quires several aspects to consider, such as wireless networks, fixed applications, mobile applica-tions, scalability, better performance metrics, efficient routing within infrastructure, load ba-lancing, throughput enhancement, interference, robustness etc. To support communication, vari-ous routing protocols are designed for various networks (e.g. ad hoc, sensor, wired etc.). How-ever, all these protocols are not suitable for WMNs, because of the architectural differences among the networks. In this paper, a detailed simulation based performance study and analysis is performed on the reactive routing protocols to verify the suitability of these protocols over such kind of networks. Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Dynamic MANET On-demand (DYMO) routing protocol are considered as the repre-sentative of reactive routing protocols. The performance differentials are investigated using va-rying traffic load and number of source. Based on the simulation results, how the performance of each protocol can be improved is also recommended