A simulation study of multi-hop wireless network

Over a period of time there has been a massive revolution in wireless devices, ranging from centralized to infrastructureless ad hoc networks. The routing layer in an ad hoc network des the network into a seamless entity and provide transparent services to higher layer protocols. We examined the performance of the various proposed packet routing protocols and studied the effective network performance parameters with TCP regulated traffic. We studied the dependence of the performance on the transmission range of the mobile nodes with effective simulations in ns-2 simulator. We studied the performance of these routing protocols on the source application FTP and HTTP and on the choice of the ad-hoc routing protocol (AODV, DSR and DSDV). We conclude that persistent and non-persistent traffic behave quite differently in an ad-hoc network and choice of routing protocol has a major impact on the performance of the network.