Performance Analysis of

Adhoc Network Routing

Protocols
# P. Chenna Reddy , Dr. P. ChandraSekhar Reddy '
Asst. Prof in CSE, JNTU College ofEngg, Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh, INDIA, pcreddyl @rediffmail. com
Professor Coordinator, INT University, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh,INDIA, pcreddy2l @rediffmail. com
Abstract

1-4244-0731-1/06/$20.00 02006 IEEE.

Routing in adhoc networks is nontrivial due to highly

dynamic nature of the nodes. In recent years several routing
protocols targeted at mobile adhoc networks are being
proposed and prominent among them are DSD V, AOD V,
TORA, and DSR. This paper does the
comprehensive
performance analysis of the routing protocols using ns2
simulator considering all the metrics as suggested by RFC
2501. Results indicate reactive routing protocols are more
suitable for adhoc networks.
Keywords
Adhoc, DSDV, AODV, TORA, DSR, ns2

Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) [1] is a

Proactive routing protocol that solves the major problem
associated with Distance Vector routing of wired networks i.e.,
Count-to-infinity, by using Destination sequence numbers. The
DSDV protocol requires each mobile station to advertise, to
each of its current neighbours, its own routing table. Dynamic
Source Routing (DSR) [2] is a reactive protocol which uses
source routing. It computes the routes when necessary
explicitly lists this route in the packets header, identifying
each forwarding hop by the address of the next node to
which to transmit the packet on its way to the destination host.
Adhoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) [3] is
essentially a combination of both DSR and DSDV. It borrows
the basic on-demand mechanism of Route discovery and Route
Maintenance from DSR, plus the use of hop-by-hop routing,
sequence numbers from DSDV. The Temporally-Ordered
Routing Algorithm (TORA) [4] is an adaptive routing protocol
for multihop networks that possesses the following attributes:
Distributed execution, Multipath routing, both proactive and
reactive, Minimization of communication overhead via
localization of algorithmic reaction to topological changes.
II. Simulation
Our simulation environment consists of 50 wireless nodes
forming an ad hoc network, moving about over a 670 X 670
flat space for 200 seconds of simulated time. Each run of the
simulator accepts as input, a scenario file that describes the
exact motion of each node and the exact sequence of packets

originated by each node, together with the exact time at which

each change in motion or packet origination is to occur. We pregenerated 45 different scenario files with varying movement
patterns and traffic loads (Constant Bit Rate). The movement
scenario files we used for each simulation are characterized by a
pause time. Each node begins the simulation by remaining
stationary for pause time seconds. It then selects a random
destination and moves to that destination at a speed distributed
uniformly between 0 and some maximum speed (20 mls). Upon
reaching the destination, the node pauses again for pause time
seconds, selects another destination, and proceeds as
previously described, repeating this behaviour for the duration
of the simulation.
A.

B.

Path optimality' The difference between the number

of hops a packet took to reach its destination and the
length of the shortest path that physically existed.
Packets test' It is a measure of the number of packets
dropped by the routers due to various reasons.
Average Delay: Average amount of time taken by a
packet to go from source to destination.

Simulation results

Metrics
In comparing the protocols, we chose the following
metrics

Throughput' It is defined as total number of packets

received by the destination.
Sorting overhead: The ratio between the total number
of routing packets transmitted to data packets.

Fig. : Total number of packets received at various levels of mobility

throughput of AODV and TORA. DSR outperforms all the

protocols as far as throughput is concerned. The descending
order of performance when throughput is considered as metric
is DSR, AODV, TORA, and DSDV. DSR, AODV, and TORA
show little performance variation as the mobility increases. The
impact of mobility on DSDV is significant and the
performance of DSDV decreases drastically with increase in
mobility. The routing overhead introduced by TORA as shown
in Fig. 4 is significant which indicates poor utilization of the
available bandwidth. The overhead of AODV decreases as the
mobility decreases. The overhead of DSDV and DSR
is
negligible.

Fig. 2: Delay introduced by routing protocols with variation in mobility

DSDV drops more number of packets than any other protocol

as shown in Fig 3. The average delay introduced by AODV is
very less and is nearly constant as shown in Fig 2. Similar is
the case with DSDV. TORA introduces spikes in delay of
packets as there is chance for short-lived and long-lived loops.
DSR introduces high delay under high mobility conditions but
significantly less than that of TORA. The path optimality
characteristic of DSDV as shown in Fig. 5 is significantly
better than other prococols. DSR has similar characteristic.
TORA and AODV uses suboptimal path even under low
mobility conditions.
Fig. 3 : Total number of packets dropped with variation in mobility

In this paper, performance evaluation of four routing

protocols DSDV, AODV, TORA and DSR is done. proactive
routing protocol DSDV performance is poor indicating that it is
not suitable for adhoc networks. DSR with aggressive use of
cache memory performs better than all the remaining protocols.
TORAs performance is not stable particularly due to shortlived loops. There is only slight variation in performance
between AODV and DSR.
References

C.

[1] Charles E. Perkins and Pravin Bhagwat, Highly dynamic

Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector routing (DSDV) for
mobile computers, Proc. SIGCOMM 94 Conference on
Communications Architectures, Protocols and Applications, pages
234244, August 1994.
[2] David B. Johnson, David A. Maltz, and Yih-Chun Hu, The
Dynamic Source Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc
Networks (DSR), <draft-ietf-manet-dsr-10.txt> Internet-draft,
19 July 2004.
[3] C. Perkins, E. Belding-Royer, and S. Das, Ad hoc OnDemand Distance Vector (AODV) Routing, RFC 3561, July
2003.
[4] V. Park and S. Corson, Temporally Ordered Routing
Algorithm (TORA) Version 1, Functional specification IETF
Internet draft, http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf- manettora-spec-01.txt, 1998.
[5] S. Corson, and J. Macker, Mobile Ad hoc Networking
(MANET): Routing Protocol Performance Issues and
Evaluation Considerations, RFC 2501, January 1999.

Simulation Analysis

The simulation results bring out some

important
characteristic differences between the routing protocols. From
Fig. 1 the following can be inferred: There is little difference in