A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Routing Protocols in MANET

Abstract: Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are decentralized, self-configuring, without any fixed infrastructure and temporary network where participating nodes/devices are working as host as well asrouters.Every communicating device/node in MANET is free to movefor making the multi-hop network topology. Selection of a routing protocol for mobile network is an emerging research area in mobile computing and communication. In order to select appropriate routing protocol, IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) MANET group has given certain parameters. These parameters define the reservedcharacteristics of a protocol. This paper isexplaining different routing protocols and comparing them onqualitative and quantitative parameters. Many qualitative metrics such as security, routing scheme, routing metric, multicasting, nodes with special task and average end-to-end delay are discussed in various protocols like DSDV, AODV, DSR, TORA and OLSR.

Keywords: AODV, DSDV, DSR, Evaluation Metric, OLSR.