Performance Comparison of Reactive Routing Protocols for Ad Hoc Network

An Ad Hoc network is a set of portable nodes, that could establish communication anytime and anywhere between themselves; however, a set of routing protocols is needed to set the routes between nodes in order to deliver a message from the source to the destination node. Many routing protocols have been proposed in order to achieve optimum routing performance in a mobile Ad Hoc network scenario, but the Ad Hoc networks also pose various challenges. These challenges include rapid topology changes, unreliable wireless channel and network congestion. In this paper, a critical comparative analysis has been carried out on the two most popular routing protocols, namely Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector Routing Protocol (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing Protocol (DSR). The performance metrics in this study include: Packet loss, Energy Consumption, Throughput, Packet delivery fraction and Average end-to-end delay. Their performance has been simulated using NS-2 and evaluated for varying packet sizes against a range of network sizes. This is repeated for CBR and exponential traffic models.