Performance Evaluation and Traffic Analysis for Routing Protocols in a Real MANET

Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs) are characterized by bandwidth constrained links, multiple hops, varying link qualities and highly dynamic topologies. In this paper, we evaluate the performance and analyze the traffic of a mobile ad-hoc network in a realistic setting. Using simulation, we provide results of performance evaluation in terms of various metrics. We study performance with scenarios of different propagation matrices, different traffic mixes, and different routing protocols (DSDV, DSR, AODV). The results show that in most cases, the performance is sensitive to the routing protocol, path loss, and traffic characteristics. This provides rationale and insight for choosing the right protocols to provide quality of service in terms of different metrics in different environments. Also, we find that in a MANET, we obtain long-range dependency traffic regardless of source file size distribution. This discovery will help in providing methodology to tackle the network dimensioning problem in ad hoc networks.