Impact of node density and mobility on the performance of AODV and DSR in MANETS

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETS) are formed by a collection of mobile nodes that have the ability to form a communication network without the help of any fixed infrastructure. Because of the nature of these networks, routing protocols play a prominent role in their scalability and overall performance. Due to limited radio transmission range, multiple hops may be required in order to exchange data among the communicating nodes. So, a key requirement of any efficient routing protocol is to find a route between two communicating nodes quickly and with low bandwidth overheads. This study inspects two MANET protocols (i.e. Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector routing (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR)) and examines their performance based on variation of node density and mobility using mobility models such as Random Way Point (RWP) and Random Way Point with Attractions (RWP-ATTR). The performance is determined on the basis of packet delivery ratio, normalized routing load, throughput and average end-to-end delay with varying node density and mobility. DSR with higher node density shows an extreme degradation in performance. The non-uniform node distribution that occurred for RWP has significant impact on performance results for both protocols.