International Journal of Advances in Engineering & Technology, Sept 2012. ©IJAET ISSN: 2231-1963 120 Vol. 4, Issue 2, pp. 120-127 COMPARATIVE PERFORMANCE EXPLORATION OF AODV, DSDV & DSR ROUTING PROTOCOL IN CLUSTER BASED VANET ENVIRONMENT Yatendra Mohan Sharma 1 & Saurabh Mukherjee 2 1 Research Scholar & 2 Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Banasthali University, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India ABSTRACT Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is self-organizing wheeled networks that enable communication in between high speed moving road vehicles like cars, trucks, busses etc. in VANET network each vehicle behave as a mobile node and can be move in any direction with varying speeds that makes highly dynamic environment. The existing mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) routing protocol are unsuitable for VANET because of frequently change in mobility pattern and topology of this network. In last few years many ideas has come and implemented in this area but still there is scope of modernization. The reconstruction of existing protocol or introducing new idea of routing in VANET environment will be a milestone and the performance evaluation will be a nice approach towards that. In this paper we evaluate performance of AODV, DSDV and DSR routing protocol on the basis performance metric packet delivery ratio, end to end delay, and throughput of the network, in the cluster based VANET environment with increasing the number of mobile nodes. The Simulation studies are conducted using NS2. KEYWORDS: Routing Protocols, VANET, Clustering, Mobility. I. INTRODUCTION Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) are a subclass of Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) where vehicles moving at high speed are the nodes which are used to exchange data in the network. In this environment vehicle can move anywhere, any direction with varying speed that make the frequent changes in the topology and mobility pattern of VANET network that present the key difference from the MANET [1,2,3]. Today all major vehicle manufacture companies and industries focus in this area for reducing communication issues in between vehicles [4]. Many researchers has given their contribution in in this area of research like CarNet, CarTALK 2000, DRIVE, FleetNet and COMCAR projects [5-10]. The performance of the routing protocol degrades with speed and size of the network, so designing of efficient routing protocols are always challenging in high mobility environment that is main characteristic of VANET. In VANET network for exchanging data the entire mobile nodes behave as a router as well source and destination node. The DSDV (Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector) routing protocol is based on the Distributed Bellman-Ford algorithm. Each node in DSDV maintains a next-hop table, which it exchanges with its neighbors. The Dynamic Source Routing ( DSR ) protocol is based on secure routing method. In this algorithm the mobile node whose want to send data in network knows the complete path of destination and store that in route cache. The data packet carries the source path in