The Impact of Routing Protocols on the Performance of a Mobility Model in Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET)

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) comprises a group of mobile or wireless nodes that are placed randomly and dynamically which causes the constant change between nodes. When considering a routing protocol to deploy in any given situation on MANET, factors such as the mobility model, mobility of nodes, the network size and packet size should be carefully considered because the routing protocols configured with the mobility model can highly affect the performance of MANET. This paper analysed the impact of two different routing protocols (i.e. Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR)) on the performance of Random WayPoint (RWP) mobility model. Three measures of performance metrics (i.e. average throughput, average delay and average traffic received) were used. In all three-performance metrics, the simulated results indicated that Random WayPoint (RWP) configured with OLSR protocol performed better than RWP configured with DSR protocol. This indicates that the choice of a routing protocol for a specific mobility model should be considered in a network design.