A Performance Comparison of.pdf

A Performance Comparison of Multi-Hop Wireless Ad Hoc Network Routing Protocols Josh Broch David A. Maltz David B. Johnson Yih-Chun Hu Jorjeta Jetcheva Computer Science Department Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 / Abstract An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes dynamically forming a temporary network without the use of any existing network infras- tructure or centralized administration. Due to the limited transmission range of wireless network interfaces, multiple network hops may be needed for one node to exchange data with another across the network. In recent years, a variety of new routing protocols targeted specifically at this environment have been developed, but little performance information on each protocol and no realistic performance comparison between them is available. This paper presents the results of a detailed packet-level simulation comparing four multi-hop wireless ad hoc network routing protocols that cover a range of design choices: DSDV, TORA, DSR, and AODV. We have extended the ns-2 network simulator to accurately model the MAC and physical-layer behavior of the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN standard, including a realistic wireless transmission channel model, and present the results of simulations of networks of 50 mobile nodes. 1 Introduction In areas in which there is little or no communication infrastructure or the existing infrastructure is expensive or inconvenient to use, wireless mobile users may still be able to communicate through the formation of an ad hoc network. In such a network, each mobile node operates not only as a host but also as a router, forwarding packets for other mobile nodes in the network that may not be within direct wireless transmission range of each other. Each node participates in an ad hoc routing protocol that allows it to discover “multi-hop” paths through the network to any other node. The idea of ad hoc networking is sometimes also called infrastructureless networking [13], si