Performance Evaluation of Proactive and Reactive Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad hoc networks (MANETs) can perform the difficult tasks of multi-hop communication in an environment with mobile nodes and changing network topology. As one of the most fundamental problems, routing protocols have been accumulated for MANETs, and which can mainly be divided into two categories: proactive and reactive ones. In this paper, we analyze and compare typical proactive (i.e. DSDV) and reactive (i.e. AODV and DSR) routing protocols by using NS2 simulations and give detailed performance evaluations with different performance metrics.