Comparative Analysis to the Performance of Three Mobile Ad-Hoc Network Routing Protocols in Time-Critical Events of Search and Rescue Missions

Gradually, Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) play an important role in the construction of smart organization, resident, campus, search/rescue region and battlefield. MANETs are suitable for providing communication support where no fixed infrastructure exists due to conventional networks neither feasible nor economically profitable. These networks are essentially important in the case of a disaster or natural calamities situations for establishing urgent communication among rescue members. The MANET relies on routing protocols to adapt to the dynamic changes in its topology and maintain the supply of routing information to the nodes. This paper provides a comparative analysis to the most popular routing protocols in MANET environments namely, Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector (DSDV), Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Ad-hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV). The compression covers the single-path and multi-path mechanisms, and reactive and proactive behaviors of the protocols in time-critical events of search and rescue missions. The NS2 simulator is used to test and evaluate the performance of these protocols based on throughput (TP), packet delivery ratio (PDR) and packet loss ratios (PLR), and end-to-end delay (E2E delay). The results show that the most suitable MANET routing protocol for time-critical events of search and rescue missions is the AOMDV.