Study On Performance Of Ad Hoc Network Protocols

Study on ad hoc networks begins in 1970s. At that time, people began to study on the application of packet radio networks on battlefield. Be different form traditional wireless networks, ad hoc networks need not fixed infrastructure, neither need fixed base station or router for center administration. For the characteristic of agility, simpleness, low cost of network design and robust ability of living, the application field of ad hoc networks is increasing, from military application to civil application. Now, ad hoc networks become one of the hotspots of research. As one of the kernels of ad hoc networks, the primary goal of ad hoc networks routing protocols is to establish the correct and efficient route between a pair of nodes so that messages may be delivered in a timely manner. Route construction should be done with a minimum of overhead and bandwidth consumption. So, ad hoc network routing protocol is very important in contemporary researches of ad hoc networks.Till now, researchers have put forward a large amount of ad hoc networks routing protocols. Base on analysis of the working principle of exiting ad hoc networks routing protocols, including their working mechanism, algorithm, and characters, this paper makes a comprehensive analysis and experiment research on the following aspects in ad hoc networks routing protocols:1. We make a qualitative comparison to performance of different sort of ad hoc networks routing protocols, including the comparison and analysis to the characters of protocols, and to the properties such as distribution. Base on the discussion, some strategies for improvement have been raised to AODV and DSR.2. We pick the following three protocols, DSDV, AODV and DSR to make quantitative analysis. We made use of the ns2 simulating platform to simulate the three protocols. We discuss the simulating result through the comparison of the protocol in different circumstances by the quantitative analysis and comparison to the indexes of packet delivery fraction, end-to-end delay and routing overload.From the discussion to the result, we can conclude that, performance of AODV and DSR is better than DSDV. Moreover, AODV and DSR have respective advantages and disadvantages, and can be applied to different application.At last, we discuss the future and challenge of ad hoc networks routing proto.