International Research Journal of Education and Technology

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of multi-hop wireless mobile nodes that communicate with each other without centralized control or established infrastructure. Wireless links in this network are highly error-prone and can fail frequently due to node mobility, interference, and less infrastructure. Therefore, routing in MANET is a critical task due to the highly dynamic environment. In recent years, several routing protocols have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks, the most prominent of which are DSR, AODV, and TORA. This research paper provides an overview of these protocols by presenting their characteristics, functionality, advantages and limitations and then benchmarks them to analyze their performance. The goal is to see how the performance of these protocols can be improved.

Index Terms—AODV, DSR, MANET, TORA