A Comparative Study of Reactive and Proactive Routing Protocols on a Mobility Model in Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET)

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) consists of wireless nodes that are placed randomly and dynamically which results in the rapid change between the nodes. In any given situation on MANET, the choice of a routing protocol should be considered and by doing so, factors such as the mobility model, mobility of nodes, the network size and packet size should be taken into consideration because the routing protocols configured with the mobility model can highly affect the performance of MANET. This paper analysed the impact of two different routing protocols (i.e. Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR)) on the performance of Manet_Down_Left (MDL) mobility model. The simulated results indicated that Manet_Down_Left (MDL) configured with OLSR protocol performed better than MDL configured with DSR protocol.