Performance Analysis and Comparison of Reactive and Proactive MANET Routing Protocols

Mobile Ad hoc networks are characterized by multihop wireless connectivity, frequently changing network topology and the need for efficient dynamic routing protocols plays an important role. We compare the performance of three prominent Reactive protocols TORA,DSR and proactive protocol DSDV for different scenarios i.e. pause time, simulation time and no of nodes An extensive simulation is performed using NS-2 simulator and end to end delay, packet delivery ratio, packet loss ratio, throughput and jitter,Normalized Routing load. In this paper At the end it is concluded that in case of TCP DSDV(Proactive) is best and in case of CBR DSR(Reactive) is best. Performance of TORA is average in all cases except packet loss.TORA has maximum Normalized Routing load.