Comparative Study of DSR, OLSR and ZRP in MANET under Varying Pause Time and Packet Transmission Rate

MANET is an infrastructure less network which consists of mobile nodes without central administration. It’s routing algorithm should not only be capable of finding the shortest path between the source and destination, but it should also be adaptive, in terms of the changing state of the nodes, the changing load conditions of the network and also the changing state of the environment. In this paper a performance comparison of three popular mobile ad-hoc network routing protocols i.e. Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Optimization Link State Routing (OLSR) and Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) is presented with variable pause time and packet transmission rate. A network simulator QualNet 6.1 from scalable networks is used to evaluate the performance of these protocols. The performance analysis is based on different network metrics such as Average End to End delay (s), Average Jitter(s), Throughput and Packet delivery ratio.