2016 International Conference on Micro-Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering

Evaluation Study of Performance Comparison of

Topology based Routing Protocol; AODV and
DSDV in MANET
Mohd. Imran, Mohammed Abdul Qadeer
Department of Computer Engineering,
Zakir Hussain College of Engineering & Technology,
Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh-202002, India
{mimran.ce, maqadeer}@amu.ac.in

Abstract --- Science of networking is still a relatively
immature area. Proposing an efficient dynamic routing
protocol for MANET is an arduous and provoking task.
Various protocols for routing phenomenon have been
proposed to IETF [1]. Considering an ad-hoc network
which is specified by frequently changing topology and
infrastructure less connectivity, a protocol must be tested
under realistic conditions but also it should not be limited
and a sensible transmission range for communication
must be taken into account. Furthermore to exploit such
potentialities simulation modelling and theoretical
analysis have to be complemented. Many of these
protocols have been simulated and its performance have
been evaluated against numerous metrics such as delay,
packet delivery fractions and jitter. This paper compares
the characteristics of AODV and DSDV using the ns-2
simulator and the trace file has been analysed using
tracegraph tool. The result shows that AODV achieves
higher efficiency and performance under high mobility
scenario than DSDV.
Keywords—ns-2; WSN; AODV; DSDV; WRP; MANET.
I. Introduction
Mobile Ad-hoc wireless network is a ubiquitous approach
nowadays for the establishment of connectivity anytime and
anywhere. It holds its promise to the future with its
extravagance features. Due to which a lot of research efforts
have been imposed on mobile Ad-hoc networks. Since ad hoc
network is an autonomous infrastructure that doesn`t rely on
any existing infrastructure [2], it makes it most promising and
suitable candidate of communication and for the deployment
in vast hostile environments [2, 3] like battlefield or flooded
areas where need of pre-installed infrastructure is
unimaginable. A mobile ad-hoc network is characterized by
its frequently changing topology, robust communication,
multi-hop wireless connectivity and its efficient dynamic
routing mechanism.
With the continuous growth in mobile population it is
inevitable that in near future, many of the wireless hotspot
technologies will be part of our daily life. The gathering of
such a vast number of mobile nodes in a closed locations
arises the concept of an autonomous network where every
node has the freedom to move arbitrary without any hardware
connectivity with the promise of more efficient
communication. This is changing the perspective of
connectivity to internet towards reading, sending e-mail
messages, sharing information in meetings and so on [4].
II. MANET (Mobile Ad-Hoc Network)
MANET is a kind of wireless ad-hoc network and it is built,
operated and maintained by its own constituent’s mobile
nodes. Since it is independent of any pre-deployed
infrastructure, the randomness is inherited in the nodes. All
the nodes in an ad-hoc network can be connected dynamically
in any arbitrary manner. Each mobile node behaves as a
router in the network and plays vital role in the path discovery
and maintenance of the routes to the neighboring nodes in the
network [3, 5]. Since the transmission range of mobile nodes
are limited, hence each node has dependency on the
neighboring node for packet forwarding. Additional nodes in
the network may cause complexity, hence specially
configured routing protocols have been proposed that take
care of the routing and exchange of packets between the
mobile nodes that aren’t able to communicate together
directly.
In MANET [6], the concern is more to configuration and one
of the important elements that can affect the performance in
configuration is routing. Power consumption [1, 7] is another
vital issue in WSN [8] based Ad-hoc routing protocol since
the nodes in the MANET rely on batteries or other

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DOI 10.1109/ICMETE.2016.100
exhaustible means for their energy requirement. Moreover,
designing a new protocol which is best suited for arbitrary
nature of routing mechanism and optimized for the energy
conservations is still a challenging issue for the researcher. A
mobile Ad-hoc network must be able to decide the best path
between the nodes, minimize the time and overhead of
bandwidth required to coverage after change in topology.
Existing routing protocols [3, 4] for ad-hoc networks can be
classified as proactive, reactive or hybrid. The pro-active
routing protocol is also known as table driven routing
protocol as it continuously evaluates the routes within the
network, so whenever the nodes are agreed to exchange the
packets, the route is already determined and immediately
sent. Some of the example of proactive routing protocols are
DSDV [9], WRP [10] etc. In contrary with pro-active
protocols, the reactive protocols are much energy optimized
as they invoke only when the packet forwarding is needed.
As a result they are also known as on-demand protocols
whose path finding mechanism is to flood the entire network
with the route query. This process is also known route request
and after the determination of suitable path packet forwarding
is initiated. This protocol includes AODV [11], TORA and
DSR etc.
In comparison with proactive routing mechanism, the on-
demand route discovery method results much less traffic [3,
1] within the network especially when the innovative route
maintenance method is deployed. Each protocol is configured
with its own routing mechanism which have certain benefits
over others. Here comes the concept of protocol
hybridization. This process formulates or configures the
protocol with advantages of proactive and reactive while
suppressing the drawbacks. Some of the hybridized protocols
are ZRP (Zone routing Protocol) and FSR (FISHEYE
STATE ROUTING) protocol.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section III
provides details of routing protocols in Ad-hoc network;
Section IV provides our simulation methodology. The
performance evaluation and analysis will be explained in
section V. The last section VI concludes the paper.
III. ROUTING IN AD-HOC NETWORK
The routing protocols in Mobile Ad-hoc network can be
classified in two categories according to the need of reaction
from dynamic topology.
A. Table driven routing protocols
B. Reactive routing protocols
AODV and DSR are more familiar and interested routing
protocol among researcher.
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Fig 1: Ad-hoc Routing Protocols
A. Table driven routing protocol: (DSR)
The table driven routing protocol is also known as proactive
routing protocol which keep an up-to- date topological map
of the entire network. With the help of this map it is easy to
find the suitable and optimum path for the data packet
whenever it is needed. Distributed bellman-ford protocol is
former protocol in this category but suffered from lack of
coverage from “Counting to infinity” problem. As a solution
to this problem, DSDV [9, 13] protocol was proposed. In
DSDV, each mobile node maintain the routing table that
include all the possible destinations and the no of hops
(intermediate node) to them in the network. A sequence no is
associated with each route mapping to the destination and
route with highest sequence number is used for data
forwarding that helps in avoiding the problem of loop
formation. The entire network is swamped with the packets
that stores information about changes happened in the
network for example any break linkage in the path, deletion
of a node or addition of a new node. Basically there are two
types of packet for the maintenance of the route i) full dump
ii) incremental packet.
All the information about change in the network is stored
within the Full dump packet while incremental packet consist
of occasionally changed made in the network map.
B. Reactive Routing Protocol: (AODV)
This is On-demand routing protocol in which the
communication is initiated on demand of the mobile nodes.
These protocol has the ability of quick adaption of dynamic
link conditions and lower network utilization property. Since
the exchange of packet occurs when nodes are ready, hence
packet density in the route network map is lesser in
comparison with proactive routing protocol where the
network is flooded all the time with packets for periodic
monitoring of the change in the route map. The nodes do not
maintain any routing information. AODV uses the
destination sequence number to guarantee the route freshness
and loop freedom of the route. Similar to the DSR, AODV
also two phase routing mechanism: route discovery and route

Fig 2: Tracegraph tool graph generator

IV. SIMULATION METHODOLOGY

A. Simulation tools

We evaluated the performance of MANET by using ns-2

simulator. It is a distinct event-driven tool that performs the
simulation of network for studying the dynamic nature of
communication networks. It provides a highly modular
Fig 2: Flowchart of AODV protocol platform for wired and wireless simulations supporting
different network elements, protocols, traffic, and routing
maintenance. When the two nodes are ready to handshake for types [12, 13]. It consists of two simulation tools. The
communication while they do not have any route information, network simulator (NS) contains all commonly used IP
phase 1 is initiated. The route request packet RREQ is protocols. The network animator (NAM) is used to visualize
broadcasted to the neighboring nodes. They propagate the simulations as shown in fig 2. NS-2 fully simulates a
through entire network until they do not reach the destination layered network from the physical radio transmission channel
node or the node which contain the information about the to high-level applications. It was initially developed as an
destination. The neighboring node acknowledges the RREQ object-oriented extension of the Tool command language
packet by sending route reply message to source node if it is (Tcl) [13].
the destination node otherwise it increments it hop count field
and broadcast the RREQ message to another. If it receive The simulation graph has been plotted by using Tracegraph
route request error RERR, it assumes that either the tool. Trace graph is a free network trace file analyzer
destination node is note active or the link is broken. developed for network simulator ns-2 trace processing. Trace
graph can support any trace format if converted to its own or
TABLE 1 ns-2 trace format. Trace graph is supported by Windows,
COMPARISON TABLE
Linux, UNIX and MAC OS systems. Trace converter
S. No AODV DSDV
processes traces over 80x faster and is available to buy.
1. Pre communication No table required
routing information before
communication Supported ns-2 trace file formats:
2. Constant and periodic No periodic updates [1] wired
propagation of route required. [2] satellite
maintenance packet [3] wireless (old and new trace)
3. More power Lower power [4] new trace
consumption consumption [5] Wired - wireless.
4. Less Energy Efficient Energy Efficient
B. Simulation parameter
5. Substantial traffic in Less traffic to the
route network due to route map TABLE 2
packet flood SIMULATION PARAMETER
6. Less latency for first Latency is more
transmitted packet

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 Routing Protocol AODV, DSDV
Channel Type Channel/Wireless Channel
Antenna Type Omni Antenna
Mobility Model Random Waypoint Model
Maximum Packet in 50
Interface queue
Number of nodes 10,20
Simulation Time 5.52sec
Pause Time 5ms
Environment Size 1800 x 840 Fig 4 (a): Transmission Throughput of AODV
Traffic Size CBR(Constant Bit rate)
Packet Size 512 bytes
Packet rate 5 packets/sec
Simulator NS 2.31

V. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND ANALYSIS

The main key parameter used in this paper for the evaluation
of Ad-hoc network and performance comparison of AODV Fig 4 (b): Transmission throughput of DSDV
and DSDV are transmission Throughput, receiving
throughput, and end to end delay [13].

Throughput: It is the number of packet that is passing

through the channel in a particular unit of time. This
performance metric show the total number of packets that
have been successfully delivered from source node to
destination node and it can be improved with increasing node
density. The throughput is usually measured in bits per
second (bits/sec). A throughput with a higher value is more
often an absolute choice in every network.

Fig. 4 presents the graph of the transmission throughput for

Fig 5 (a): Receiver throughput of AODV
both of protocol. Fig 4 (a) represent the transmission
throughput of the AODV channel while 4 (b) is representing
the same for DSDV. It is observed that sending throughput is
maximum in the time interval 0 to 5 for both of the routing
protocol. And rest of the time sending throughput is almost
constant. Here, it is observed that AODV performance is
better than DSDV in terms of sending throughput.

Fig. 5 presents the graph of the receiving throughput for both

of protocol. Fig 5 (a) represent graph of AODV channel while
5 (b) is representing the same for DSDV. It is visible that
receiving throughput is maximum in the time interval 4 to 5 Fig 5 (b): Receiver throughput of DSDV
for both of the protocol but with increasing simulation time
interval, AODV performance rate sequentially increasing in
comparison with DSDV.

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End to End delay Cumulative distribution:
Fig 6 (a) and 6(b) are representing the end to end delay
cumulative distribution. From the graph it is clear that delay
is high initially in AODV but after some time it is very low.
But in the case of DSDV, it is very low at starting and
increase gradually specially for packets. With delay time
increasing, the cumulative delay increases and after some
time remain constant. It is interesting to note that the average
delay in AODV decreases as the mobility increases.
Fig 6 (a): End2End simulation delay cumulative distribution for
AODV
Fig 6 (b): End2End simulation delay cumulative distribution for
AODV
VI. CONCLUSION
The aim of this comparative study of AODV and DSDV is to
simulate and analyze the behavior of Ad-hoc network
operating in different configured protocol. We focused on the
following parameters (i) Transmission throughput, (ii)
Receiving throughput, and (iii) End to End delay. Based on
the simulation results, we have obtained that transmission
throughput first increases and then goes on decreases with
increase in simulation time because of node density, less
traffics and free channel for both of protocol. Here AODV
performance is better than DSDV in terms of sending
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throughput. But receiving throughput is maximum for DSDV
protocol because, it maintains periodic table which broadcast
routing table continuously to its neighbor for update. For the
same time interval AODV decrease because of less active
route. It is interesting to note that the average delay in AODV
decreases as the mobility increases but for DSDV it increases
gradually. So we can conclude that AODV indicating its
highest efficiency and performance under high mobility than
DSDV. Simulation results show the performance of both
protocol with respect to the average end to end delay,
throughput. Finally, it is concluded that the performance of
AODV is better than DSDV routing protocol for real time
applications. In future, it would be interesting to note and
analyze the behavior of MANET on real life test-bed.
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