Performance Study of Proactive, Reactive and Hybrid Routing Protocols for MANET in Multiple CBR Scenario

Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) comprises of numerous ubiquitous mobile computing devices called nodes which form distributed network and support dynamic topology without any centralized infrastructure like base station. In such distributed network, the communication between the nodes relies on multihop technique. Since, the nodes in a MANET do not have a priori knowledge of the network topology, it discovers the route through broadcasting and listening to announcement from the neighbours. As the process continues, each node finds one or more routes to all other nodes. Hence, the end-to-end communication in a MANET does not rely on any underlying static network infrastructure but implicates routing via several intermediate nodes. The routing of data in the network depends on the protocol which determines the most appropriate path to forward packets to the intended destination. The routing protocols are classified into proactive, reactive and hybrid. In this paper, an attempt has been made to evaluate performance of proactive, reactive and hybrid routing protocols in scenarios with multiple CBR connections by varying node density and node mobility. The simulation studies are carried out using Qualnet 6.1 network simulator by considering total packets received, throughput, average end-to-end delay and average jitter as performance metrics.