Performance Comparisons of Geographic Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Geographic routing protocols greatly reduce the requirements of topology storage and provide flexibility in the accommodation of the dynamic behavior of mobile ad hoc networks. This paper presents performance evaluations and comparisons of two geographic routing protocols and the popular AODV protocol. The tradeoffs among the average path reliabilities, average conditional delays, average conditional numbers of hops, and area spectral efficiencies and the effects of various parameters are illustrated for finite ad hoc networks with randomly placed mobiles. This paper uses a dual method of closed-form analysis and simple simulation that is applicable to most routing protocols and provides a much more realistic performance evaluation than has previously been possible. Some features included in the new analysis are shadowing, exclusion and guard zones, distance-dependent fading, and interference correlation.