A Study of MANET Routing Protocols in Heterogeneous Networks: A Review and Performance Comparison

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are becoming a popular networking technology as they can easily be set up and provide communication support on the go. These networks can be used in application areas such as battlefields and disaster relief operations where infrastructure networks are not available. Like media access control protocols, MANET routing protocols can also play an important role in determining the network capacity and system performance. Research on the impact of heterogeneous nodes in a MANET performance is required for proper deployment of such systems. While MANET routing protocols have been studied and reported in the networking literature extensively, the performance of heterogeneous nodes/devices on system performance has not been fully explored yet. The main objective of this paper is to review and compare the performance of four selected MANET routing protocols (AODV, OLSR, BATMAN and DYMO) in a heterogeneous MANET setting. We consider three different types of nodes in the MANET routing performance study, namely PDAs (fixed nodes with no mobility), Laptops (low mobility nodes) and mobile phones (high mobility nodes). We measure the QoS metrics such as end-to-end delays, throughput, and packet delivery ratios using OMNET++-network simulator. The findings reported in this paper provide some insights into MANET routing performance issues and challenges that can help network researchers and engineers to contribute further towards developing next generation wireless network capable of operating heterogeneous networking constraints.