Comparative Study of Reactive and Proactive Routing Protocols Performance in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The mobility of nodes in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) results in frequent changes of network topology making routing in MANETs a challenging task. Some studies have been reported in the literature to evaluate the performance of the proposed routing algorithms. However, since the publication of experimental standards for some routing protocols by IETF, little activity has been done to contrast the performance of reactive against proactive protocols. This paper evaluates the performance of reactive (AODV, DSR) and proactive (OLSR) routing protocols in MANETs under CBR traffic with different network conditions. Our results, contrarily to previously reported studies conducted on the same routing protocols, show the superiority of proactive over reactive protocols in routing such traffic at the cost of a higher routing load.