Investigating the Performance of Routing Protocols Using Quantitative Metrics in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

3 ABSTRACT: Mobile ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes which are capable of exchanging information dynamically among themselves without the need of any fixed infrastructure. Inorder to transfer data among these mobile nodes, the process of routing is adopted, which makes use of a routing protocol inorder to select a path along the mobile nodes in the network, through which data packets are sent. Due to dynamic nature of mobile ad hoc networks, links setup between the mobile nodes break most frequently and hence a routing protocol must be efficient enough in handling such situations and should deliver better performance in every aspect. In this paper, the performance of three routing protocols AODV, DSDV and DSR has been analysed using Network Simulator-2. Their performance is evaluated using Quantitative metrics - packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, normalized routing load and jitter by varying node density and node mobility. The simulation results the routing protocol which gives better performance in various scenarios.