Performance comparison of three routing protocols for ad hoc networks

Many routing protocols for ad hoc networks have been proposed to date. Among them, STAR (source tree adaptive routing protocol) is a representative table-driven protocol, while AODV (ad hoc on-demand distance vector protocol) and DSR (dynamic source routing protocol) are two representative on-demand protocols. This paper analyzes these three protocols using the GloMoSim simulation environment. The scenarios used in the simulation experiments take into account a variety of environmental factors that influence protocol performance. The performance of the protocols is compared in terms of their control overhead, amount of data delivered, and average latency in packet delivery. The simulation results show that STAR achieves better overall performance than AODV and DSR in sparsely connected networks. For the case of densely connected networks, AODV performs better in terms of data delivery, while STAR performs much better in terms of control overhead. The study also addresses the question of how accurate a simulator could be regarded for presenting the characteristics of the routing protocols and for comparison purposes.