Comparative Analysis of MANET Routing Protocols under Dynamic Traffic Conditions

Abstract

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are collection of nodes without static infrastructure and rely on cooperative routing among mobile nodes. It makes routing performance a critical factor in overall network efficiency. This study presents a comparison of four MANET routing protocols i.e. DSDV, OLSR, FSR and ZRP. A mobile network of 30 nodes was developed under controlled mobility and wireless communication settings in NS2. Performance analysis was conducted under two traffic scenarios. (1) Communication without background traffic and (2) communication with additional competing flows to simulate real congestion. Simulation results show that packet delivery reached approximately 94% in uncongested network, whereas, declined to around 78–90% under back-ground traffic. Throughput values varied between nearly 480 kbps in low-load conditions and about 340kbps during background traffic. Average delay increased from nearly 130ms to 250ms with rising background traffic. Routing overhead also increased notably in congested scenarios. The findings indicate that proactive routing protocols immediate route availability. On the other hand hybrid protocol demonstrates a more balanced trade-off between data delivery and delay. Such insights are very useful for applications such as disaster recovery, military communication and temporary wireless deployments where reliable and infrastructure-less network is required.