Performance Evaluation of Heartbeat-Style Failure Detector over Proactive and Reactive Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Ad hoc wireless networks are characterized with multi-hop connectivity and frequently changing network topology. Routing protocol plays a very important role to ensure each packet reaches its destination node in Ad hoc wireless network. Many different routing protocols have been proposed in literature, but no performance comparison of heartbeat-style failure detection service over them is available. In this paper, we do the comprehensive simulations to investigate the performance of heartbeat-style failure detector over proactive and reactive routing protocols with ns-2 simulator. The performance different are analyzed using varying the number of nodes, mobility speed, transmission range. Results show that DSDV performed better in average delay and average failure detection time, AODV performed better in normalized routing overhead, delivery ratio, energy consumption ratio, false detection ratio. The observations can be used to motivate and improve future implementations of failure detection service in Ad hoc wireless networks.