Link Cost Based Routing In MANET: A Simulation Study

Mobile Ad hoc network (MANET) is composed of a set of mobile nodes withwireless transceiver and characterized by its multi-hop, temporariness and no-center.Wireless MANET is widely used in rescue, military and remote area research applicationsdue to the attractive properties of building a network on the fly and not requiring anypreplanned infra-structure such as a base station or central controller. The dynamictopology caused by node mobility brings great challenge for the design of routing protocol.A popular solution is to combine the on demanding routing with link cost.The performance of routing is affected by many factors, such as mobile scenario,traffic load and so on. So this thesis adopts the research method of comparison based onsimulation to analysis the routing protocol of different routing protocols. This paper firstanalysis several existing mobile link costs to extract the parameters required to designprotocols. According to requirements, this thesis designs and implements an link costbased routing framework based on AOMDV. This framework supports calculation ofdifferent link costs and path costs in the procedure of routing discovery. Using thisframework, this thesis develops several popular link cost based routing protocols whichadopt distance, link duration, link availability and combined cost as their link costrespectively.This thesis then does a performance simulation of the realized protocols. By printingthe routing information, we prove the correctness of different routing protocols and thusour framework. The simulation includes25mobile nodes and is carried out in a750*750marea under low traffic load and moderate traffic load respectively. This thesis compares theloss rate, network throughput, link breaks, average hop and average delay of differentprotocols and achieves the conclusion that different link costs based protocols performdifferent under different simulation scenarios.