Performance evaluation of routing protocols for MANETs under different traffic conditions

The mobility of nodes in a Mobile Ad hoc Network results in frequent changes of network topology making routing in MANETs a challenging task. The efficient routing protocols can provide significant benefits to mobile ad hoc networks, in terms of both performance and reliability. Many routing protocols for such networks have been proposed so far. Some studies have been reported in the literature evaluating the performance of proposed routing protocols under CBR traffic with varying network conditions, but much effort has not been focused in evaluating their performance when applied to traffic generators other than CBR like FTP, TELNET etc. CBR traffic does not reflect the complex nature of traffic in real applications and these traffic scenarios are more representatives of network loads placed on a real world MANETs. This paper presents the performance of three routing protocols AODV, DSR and WRP for FTP, TELNET and CBR traffic in terms of packet delivery ratio, throughput, average end to end delay and routing message overhead. Various network scenarios are considered like effect of change in pause time, number of source destination pairs (i.e. offered load), and average speed of nodes.