International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 99 – No.14, August 2014 17 Performance Comparison of Routing Protocols of MANET in Real World Scenario using NS3 Supriya Singla Computer Science and Engineering department Thapar University Patiala, India Sushma Jain Computer Science and Engineering department Thapar University Patiala, India ABSTRACT Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of several wireless devices or mobile users that can communicate among themselves over wireless links in a peer to peer basis and thereby creating a dynamic, arbitrary graph. But some adverse characteristics of MANET like dynamic topology, limited bandwidth, link failure and energy constraints, imposes new demands on routing protocol. This paper aims to study the performance evaluation and comparison of three prominent routing protocols: Destination Sequence Distance Vector (DSDV), Ad-hoc On demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR), in a real life scenario. In a given scenario, students investigate the historical site in which number of packets being sends and number of nodes in the network affects the communication reliability. Extensive simulations are made to evaluate the performance of these protocols using various performance differential metrics like packet delivery ratio, total energy consumption and throughput using NS3. In the end it is seen that in most simulation results, proactive routing protocols (DSDV, OLSR) performed significantly better than reactive routing protocols. Keywords Ad hoc; Routing Protocols; AODV; DSDV; OLSR; Scenario; Performance comparison; NS3. 1. INTRODUCTION Evolution of wireless and mobile communication, enables users use their cellular phones to browse the Internet anywhere but these networks require centralized administration with fixed network infrastructure, that also includes set-up and maintenance cost. But, easy availability of mobile nodes enabled with short range wireless interface and computation capability gave the concept of MANET. A Mobile ad hoc Network (MANET) [11] is a network of portable autonomous nodes equipped with wireless interface, communicates over wireless links without centralized administration. These networks can self-configure and maintain the network topology dynamically without the infrastructural support. MANETs have many applications: in tactical networks, emergency services, commercial and civilian environments, home and enterprise networking, education, entertainment, sensor networks, context aware services and coverage extension [12]. Figure 1 shows an ad hoc network with three wireless mobile hosts. Node 1 is not within the range of node 3’s wireless transmitter and vice versa. If node 1 and node 3 want to exchange packets, they must enlist the services of node 2 to forward the packets for them, since node 2 is within the range overlap between node 1 and node 3. Fig 1: Simple ad-hoc network with three participating nodes The infrastructureless design, dynamic nature, the bandwidth constrained, variable capacity of links and the network scalability, demands new set of strategies in their routing protocols to provide efficient end-to-end communication. Each protocol uses different metrics to find feasible path to reach the destination. Further each routing protocols performance is different in different scenarios due to their different methodologies of route creation and route maintenance. So it is difficult to determine which protocols may perform best under a number of different network scenarios. Simulations made till now are not based on real life scenarios. This is probably the main reason that MANETs have not been used extensively in day to day applications although they have significant advantages above traditional communication networks [13]. In this paper, in a given scenario, students investigate the historical site in which number of packets being sends and number of nodes in the network affects the communication reliability. Extensive simulations are made using various performance differential metrics like packet delivery ratio, total energy consumption and throughput. For simulations NS3 is being used. In the end it is seen that in most simulation results, proactive routing protocols (DSDV, OLSR) performed significantly better than reactive routing protocols. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2 literatures survey is presented. In Section 3 brief overview of routing protocols are pointed out. Section 4, describes real world scenario taken into consideration. Simulation results in a given scenario are shown in section 5. Finally, conclusions are drawn in section 6.