Performance Comparison and Analysis of Routing Strategies in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The performance of routing protocols in mobile ad hoc network (MANET) always attracts many attentions. As many previous works have shown, routing performance is greatly dependent to the availability and stability of wireless links. Although there are some studies reported to evaluate the performance of routing protocols in MANET, little work is done for the system overall performance, which is generally referred to as the network throughput and the end-to-end delay. This paper evaluates the routing strategies of the three routing protocols (AODV, OLSR and SRMP) and compares their performance under two different mobility models. We study those protocols under varying metrics such as node mobility and network size. Our objective is to provide a qualitative assessment of overall performance of the routing strategies in different mobility model. The results illustrate that the routing strategies behind the three protocols affect their performance deeply. Meanwhile, different from previous results in the literature, the result shows that it is the combination of routing strategies behind the routing protocols to determine the performance in given scenarios.