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A Simulation Based Performance Comparison of
Routing Protocol on Mobile Ad-hoc Network
(Proactive, Reactive and Hybrid)
Md. Arafatur Rahman and Farhat Anwar
Dept. of ECE, Faculty of Engineering
International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM)
Kula Lumpur, Malaysia
arafatiiuc@yahoo.com, farhat@iium.edu.my
Jannatul Naeem and Md. Sharif Minhazul Abedin
Dept. of EEE, Faculty of Engineering & Technology
Eastern University Bangladesh
Dhaka, Bangladesh
naeem888@gmail.com, minhaz0007@yahoo.com
Abstract— Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of
wireless mobile nodes which dynamically forms a temporary
network without the use of any existing network infrastructure
or centralized administration. Recently, there has been a
tremendous growth in the sales of laptops, handheld computers,
PDA and portable computers. These smaller computers
nevertheless can be equipped with megabytes/gigabytes of disk
storage, high-resolution color displays, pointing devices and
wireless communications adapters. Moreover, since many of
these small computers operate for hours with battery power,
users are free to move without being constrained by wires. To
support such type of scenario MANET has been designed.
MANET has several characteristics such as, dynamic topologies,
bandwidth-constrained, variable capacity links, energy-
constrained operation and limited physical security. There are
three types of routing protocols in MANET such as Proactive,
Reactive, and Hybrid. In this paper, a detailed simulation based
performance study and analysis is performed on these types of
routing protocols over MANET. Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance
Vector (AODV), and Dynamic MANET On-demand (DYMO)
routing protocol (reactive), Optimized Link State Routing
protocol (OLSR) (proactive) and Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) is
(hybrid) have been considered in this paper for the investigation
and their relative performance is reported.
Keywords- Mobile Ad-hoc network (MANET), Qualnet 4.5
Developer, AODV, DYMO, ZRP, OLSR.
I. INTRODUCTION
For the past few years there has been a tremendous growth
in the usage of notebook or laptop computers and PDAs while
their prices are steadily decreasing. Being battery operated and
with increasing processing capability, these devices are
allowing people to get internet access while on the move using
wired or wireless network. Though traditionally wired
Network was the only solution to get network or internet access
the use of wireless technology has become a more popular
technique currently to access the Internet or connect to the
local network for a corporate, educational, or private Users. It
is much easier and less expensive to organize a wireless
network compared to a conventional wired network, as the
required effort and cost of running cables are negligible.
Moreover, additional devices can be added to the wireless
network at no extra cost and wireless network have many more
advantages. Wireless equipped devices are called Nodes and
every node has a fixed transmission range to communicate with
each other. If the desired node (receiver) is out of range from
the transmitter then intermediate nodes must function as routers
and forward the packets towards the destination node thus the
communication can be established by multiple hops. In this
type of networking nodes might be moving arbitrarily which
result in multi-hop networks with dynamic topology. This sort
of network is called Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET).
MANET is a collection of wireless mobile nodes which
dynamically forms a temporary network without the use of any
existing network infrastructure or centralized administration.
For this purpose different types of protocols for MANET have
been designed such as DSDV, AODV, TORA, DYMO, ZRP,
and OLSR. These protocols can handle different situation of
MANET. Performance comparison among some set of
MANET routing protocols (Proactive, Reactive and Hybrid) is
already done by the researchers such as among PAODV,
AODV, CBRP, DSR, and DSDV [1], among DSDV, DSR,
AODV, and TORA [2], among SPF, EXBF, DSDV, TORA,
DSR, and AODV [3], among DSR and AODV [4], among
STAR, AODV and DSR [5] and among AM Route, ODMRP,
AMRIS and CAMP [6]. This paper presents the performance
comparison of OLSR, AODV, ZRP and DYMO routing
protocols where OLSR, AODV and ZRP are the prominent
protocols of Proactive, Reactive and Hybrid nature respectively
and DYMO is reactive routing protocol which has been
especially designed for MANET. To the best of the authors’
knowledge no reported study has been found yet representing
the relative merits and demerits among the above mentioned
protocol.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Descriptions
of routing protocols are given in Section II. Section III
describes simulation environment. Results are discussed and
analyzed in section IV. Finally, conclusion is drawn in section
V.
International Conference on Computer and Communication En
g
ineerin
g
(ICCCE 2010), 11-13 Ma
y
2010, Kuala Lumpur, Mala
y
sia
978-1-4244-6235-3/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE
II. DESCRIPTION OF THE PROTOCOLS
A. OLSR
Optimized Link State Routing protocol (OLSR) [3, 8] is
based on link state algorithm and it is proactive in nature.
OLSR is an optimization over a pure link state protocol [1] as it
squeezes the size of information send in the messages, and
reduces the number of retransmissions. It provides optimal
routes in terms of number of hops. For this purpose, the
protocol uses multipoint relaying technique to efficiently flood
its control messages [3]. Unlike DSDV and AODV, OLSR
reduces the size of control packet by declaring only a subset of
links with its neighbors who are its multipoint relay selectors
and only the multipoint relays of a node retransmit its
broadcast messages. Hence, the protocol does not generate
extra control traffic in response to link failures and node
join/leave events. OLSR is particularly suitable for large and
dense networks [3]. In OLSR, each node uses the most recent
information to route a packet. Each node in the network selects
a set of nodes in its neighborhood, which retransmits its
packets. This set of selected neighbor nodes is called the
multipoint relays (MPR) of that node. The neighbors that do
not belong to MPR set, read and process the packet but do not
retransmit the broadcast packet received form node. For this
purpose each node maintains a set of its neighbors, which are
called the MPR Selectors of that node. This set can change
over time, which is indicated by the selectors in their HELLO
messages. The smaller set of multipoint relay provides more
optimal routes. The path to the destination consists of a
sequence of hops through the multipoint relays from source to
destination. In OLSR, a HELLO message is broadcasted to all
of its neighbors containing information about its neighbors and
their link status and received by the node which are one hop
away but they are not relayed to further nodes. On reception of
HELLO messages, each node would construct its MPR
Selector table. Multipoint relays of a given node are declared in
the subsequent HELLO messages transmitted by this node.
B. AODV
Ad-hoc On-demand distance vector (AODV) [9] is another
variant of classical distance vector routing algorithm. Like
DSDV, AODV provides loop free routes in case of link
breakage but unlike DSDV, it doesn’t require global periodic
routing advertisement. AODV experiences unacceptably long
waits frequently before transmitting urgent information
because of its on demand fashion of route discovery [9]. In
AODV, each host maintains a traditional routing table, one
entry per destination. Each entry records the next hop to that
destination and a sequence number generated by the
destination, which indicates the freshness of this information.
AODV uses a broadcast route discovery mechanism where
source node initiate route discovery method by broadcasting a
route request (RREQ) packet to its neighbor. The RREQ packet
contains a sequence number and a broadcast id. Each neighbor
satisfied with the RREQ replies with the route reply (RREP)
packet adding one in the hop count field. Unlike DSDV, in
AODV if a node cannot satisfy the RREQ, it keeps track of the
necessary information in order to implement the reverse and
forward path setup that will accompany the transmission of the
RREP. The source sequence number is used to maintain
freshness information about the reverse route to the source and
the destination sequence number specifies how fresh a route to
the destination must be before it can be accepted by the source.
The source node can begin data transmission as soon as the
first RREP is received. Hence, the first sending of data packet
to the destination is delayed due to route discovery process.
C. DYMO
The Dynamic MANET On-demand (DYMO) [10] routing
protocol is a simple and fast routing protocol for multihop
networks. It determines unicast routes among DYMO routers
within the network in an on-demand fashion, offering
improved convergence in dynamic topologies. To ensure the
correctness of this protocol, Digital signatures and hash chains
are used. The basic operations of the DYMO protocol are route
discovery and route management. Firstly, route discovery is the
process of creating a route to a destination when a node needs a
route to it. When a source node wishes to communicate with a
destination node, it initiates a Route Request (RREQ) message.
In the RREQ message, the source node includes its own
address and its sequence number, which is incremented before
it is added to the RREQ. It can also include prefix value and
gateway information if the node is an Internet gateway capable
of forwarding packets to and from the Internet. Finally, a hop
count for the originator is added with the value 1. Then
information about the destination node is added. The most
important part is the address of the destination node. If the
originating node knows a sequence number and hop count for
the target, these values are also included. Upon sending the
RREQ, the originating node will await the reception of an
RREP message from the target. If no RREP is received within
RREQ waiting time the node may again try to discover a route
by issuing another RREQ. When the RREQ reaches the
destination node, an RREP message is created as a response to
the RREQ, containing information about destination node, i.e.,
address, sequence number, prefix, and gateway information,
and the RREP message is sent back along the reverse path
using unicast. Similar to the RREQ dissemination, every node
forwarding the RREP adds its own address to the RREP and
installs routes to destination node. Secondly, route maintenance
is the process of responding to changes in topology that
happens after a route has initially been created. To maintain
paths, nodes continuously monitor the active links and update
the Valid Timeout field of entries in its routing table when
receiving and sending data packets. If a node receives a data
packet for a destination it does not have a valid route for, it
must respond with a Route Error (RERR) message. When
creating the RERR message, the node makes a list containing
the address and sequence number of the unreachable node. In
addition, the node adds all entries in the routing table that is
dependent on the unreachable destination as next hop entry.
The purpose is to notify about additional routes that are no
longer available. The node sends the list in the RERR packet.
The RERR message is broadcasted.
D. ZRP
Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) [11] is a hybrid protocol
which combines the advantages of both proactive and reactive
schemes. It was designed to mitigate the problems of those
two schemes. Proactive routing protocol uses excess bandwidth
to maintain routing information, while reactive protocols
suffers from long route request delays and inefficient flooding
the entire network for route determination. ZRP addresses
these problems by combining the best properties of both
approaches. Each node in ZRP, proactively maintains routes to
destinations within a local neighborhood, which is referred as a
routing zone. However, size of a routing zone depends on a
parameter known as zone radius. In ZRP, each node maintains
the routing information of all nodes within its routing zone.
Nodes learn the topology of its routing zone through a
localized proactive scheme, referred as an Intra-zone Routing
Protocol (IARP). No protocol is defined to serve as an IARP
and can include any proactive routing protocol, such as
distance vector or link state routing. Different zone may
operate with different proactive routing protocols as long as the
protocols are restricted within the zone. A change in topology
only affects the nodes inside the zone, even though the network
is quite large. The Inter-zone Routing Protocol (IERP) is
responsible for reactively discovering routes to the destination
beyond a node’s routing zone. This is used if the destination is
not found within the routing zone. The route request packets
are transmitted to all border nodes, which in turn forward the
request if the destination node is not found within their routing
zone. IERP distinguish itself from standard flood search by
implementing the concept, called border-casting. The border-
casting packet delivery service is provided by the Border-cast
Resolution Protocol (BRP) [12]. For detecting link failure and
new neighbor nodes, ZRP relies on a protocol provided by the
Media Access Control (MAC) layer, known as Neighbor
Discovery Protocol (NDP). If MAC level NDP is not
supported, the functionality must be provided by IARP. NDP
transmits HELLO beacons at regular intervals to advertise their
presence. After receiving a beacon, neighbor table is updated.
If no beacon is received from a neighbor within a specified
time, the neighbor is considered as lost.
III. SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT
The overall goal of this simulation study is to analyze the
performance of reactive, proactive and hybrid routing protocols
in Mobile Ad-hoc environment. The simulation has been
performed using QualNet version 4.5[13], a software that
provides scalable simulations of Ad hoc Networks and a
commercial version of GloMoSim. Here the traffic and
mobility model is different from the common traffic and
mobility model used in. This traffic model is designed for
dense area of mobile nodes and used reasonable
mobility/traffic speed in any metropolitan city. Traffic sources
are Constant Bit Rate (CBR). By changing the total number of
traffic sources, we get scenarios with traffic loads 30 sources,
the packet rate at the source node is 4 packets/sec. The source
destination pairs spread randomly over the network. Only 512
byte data packets are used. The number of source destination
pairs and the packet sending rate in each pair is varied to
change the offered load in the network. The mobility model
uses the random waypoint model in a rectangular field. In our
simulation, we consider a network of 120 nodes that are placed
randomly within a 1500m X 1500m and operating over 200
seconds. Here each packet starts its journey from a random
source location to a random destination. The simulation is run
with mobility patterns generated for 11 different pause times.
A two-ray propagation path loss model is used in our
experiments with lognormal shadowing model. The MAC
802.11 is chosen as the medium access control protocol. The
specific access scheme is CSMA/CA with acknowledgements.
In order to fully guarantee the service types, we configure 8
queues at the network layer. Unsolicited grant service (UGS)
service type is considered to support real-time data streams
consisting of fixed-size data packets issued at periodic
intervals.
To evaluate the performance of routing protocols, we use
four different quantitative metrics to compare the performance
of the selected protocols. They are
x Packet Delivery Fraction: The fraction of packets sent
by the application that are received by the receivers
[14].
x Average End-to-end delay: End-to-end delay indicates
how long it took for a packet to travel from the source
to the application layer of the destination [15].
x Jitter: Jitter is the variation in the time between packets
arriving, caused by network congestion, timing drift, or
route changes.
x Throughput: The throughput is defined as the total
amount of data a receiver receives from the sender
divided by the time it takes for the receiver to get the
last packet [16].
IV. SIMULATION RESULT AND DISCUSSIONS
In this section simulation results for the selected protocols
in term of packet delivery fraction, average end-to-end delay,
jitter and throughput are elaborated.
A. Simulation result for packet delivery fraction
Figure 1 shows the simulation results of packet delivery
fraction verses pause time for 30 nodes. DYMO has the
highest packet delivery fraction (33%). In MANET AODV is
purely on-demand routing protocol and DYMO is
Dynamically on-demand routing protocol that means DYMO
can be adjusted dynamically and send data better than AODV.
In case of the link breakage and route error or route discovery
failure AODV sends two times RREQ for getting destination
route whereas DYMO sends three times RREQ thus leading to
better performance for DYMO than AODV. Packet delivery
fraction of ZRP and AODV are similar but better than OLSR.
This is because, Zone Routing Protocol has both proactive and
reactive nature. OLSR has proactive nature and it can not form
routing table proficiently with the dynamically changing
network. During link breakage OLSR fails to resend data.
Moreover, it is efficient for cluster and close network nodes.
So OLSR has lower performance than other protocols.
B. Simulation result for Average end-to-end delay
In figure 2 average end-to-end delay verses pause times are
plotted. It shows the average time it took for a packet to travel
from the source to destination’s application layer. OLSR and
ZRP demonstrate lower delay than other two protocols due to
their operation which is table driven in nature. The presence of
routing information in advance leads to lower average end-to-
end delay. But DYMO shows worst performance in the case of
average end-to-end delay. DYMO often uses stale routes due
to the large route cache, which leads to frequent packet
retransmission thus leading to extremely high average end-to-
end delay. AODV shows an average performance with respect
to DYMO, ZRP, and OLSR protocols. As shown in figure 2
average end-end delay of AODV is more than ZRP and
OLSR. AODV broadcast messages through entire network to
find its destination because of its reactive nature. AODV
needs more time in route discovery. Hence it leads to greater
end-to-end delay. So as compared to other protocols average
end-end delay of ZRP and OLSR offers better performance.
C. Simulation result for jitter
Figure 3 shows value of pause time verses jitter. DYMO
uses multi path routing so that more probability of collision of
packet leading to higher jitter value (more than 2.5s). DYMO
has greater chance to packet loss between transmission packets.
AODV shows average good performance in terms of jitter
though it is still higher than ZRP and OLSR protocols. AODV
uses a broadcast route discovery mechanism where source node
initiate route discovery method by broadcasting a route request
(RREQ) packet to its neighbors so there is more scope for
jitter. OLSR is proactive in nature and it provides optimal
routes in terms of number of hops. For this purpose, the
protocol uses multipoint relaying technique to efficiently flood
its control messages. So that OLSR has less jittering than other
protocol. ZRP is Hybrid type protocol that also shows better
performance in terms of jitter due to reduced message flooding.
D. Simulation result for Throughput
In figure 4 the throughput result for 30 source nodes are
shown. The graph shows ZRP has highest throughput value
than other protocols. ZRP delivers data packets at higher rate
because of proactive and reactive characteristics. In ZRP, while
sending in INTRA zone routing protocol if it fails to send data
or link breakdown occurs then INTER zone routing protocol
will be activated. Henceforth data transfer will continue. OLSR
has worst performance in throughput than other protocols
because most of the nodes can not participate in data transfer.
Another reason is link breakage since OLSR cannot repair
route of breakage path. AODV and DYMO show good
throughput performance than OLSR but less than ZRP. DYMO
shows better performance than AODV because it can adjust
dynamically in case of the change in the network topology and
can do better route repair function than AODV.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the performance of OLSR, AODV, DYMO
and ZRP is compared with respect to four performance metrics.
DYMO shows best performance than AODV, OLSR, and ZRP
in term of packet delivery fraction. Where ZRP and AODV
show close value in the graph while OLSR performed the
worst. But in terms of average end-to-end delay and jitter
DYMO performed the worst. OLSR and ZRP performed the
best in terms of the average end-to-end delay and jitter
compared to AODV and DYMO. ZRP shows the best
performance in terms of throughput compared to DYMO,
AODV and OLSR The overall performance considering the
metrics packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, jitter
and throughput, ZRP demonstrates the best performance than
the remaining three routing protocols
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