Performance evaluation of routing protocols for heterogeneous Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Routing protocols play an important role in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) since they are necessarily required by all nodes in these networks to find the best paths to reach the other nodes. However, these protocols are usually measured/analyzed in homogeneous networks where all nodes in these networks have the same capabilities e.g. transmission range, transmitting power, link bandwidth and so on. Hence, homogeneous networks are not suitable for theoretical analysis, simulation measurement or performance testbed in the real applications because different types of nodes usually exist (or they are configured with different parameters). So, they practically have different characteristics and capabilities. This is called heterogeneous networks. In this work, various scenarios (e.g. load, mobility- and density-varying conditions) are constructed to measure the performances of ad hoc routing protocols in heterogeneous networks. The protocols that are taken into consideration are DSR, AODV and OLSR since they are accepted by IETF MANET working group for standardization.