Multicasting Technique to Enhance the Performance of DSR Routing Protocol Using Various Performance Metrics under Different Traffic Conditions in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Development of an efficient routing protocol is one of the major key challenges in the design of Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). DSR reactive routing protocol is the most preferred routing protocol in MANETs due its capability to store already discovered routes in the node’s cache. In DSR routing protocol, in order to find a route to the destination, the source node broadcasts RREQ (Route Request) packets to its all neighbouring nodes and this broadcasting of RREQ packets results in more overhead. In this paper, we propose a multicasting technique to enhance the performance of DSR routing protocol and to reduce the broadcasting overhead. The performance analysis of DSR and enhanced DSR (EDSR) is carried out by varying number of nodes under different traffic conditions with different packet sizes and different network sizes. Also the performance analysis of DSR and enhanced DSR is carried out under different propagation models. The performance metrics used for the performance analysis of DSR and Enhanced DSR are Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Average End-to-End Delay, Throughput, Normalized Routing Load (NRL) and Energy Consumption.