998:362

MASTER'S THESIS

Routing Protocols in Wireless Ad-hoc

Networks A Simulation Study

Hedman

Tony Larsson, Nicklas

met

98/362--SE

Civilingenjrsprogram

1998:362 ISSN: 1402-1617 ISRN: LTU-EX--

Science and Engineering

Masters thesis in Computer

Routing Protocols in Wireless Adhoc Networks A Simulation Study

holm, 1998
Nicklas Hedman
of Technology

Stock
Tony Larsson and
Lule University

Supervisor: Per Johansson

Switchlab
Ericsson Telecom AB
Examiner: Mikael Degermark
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Division of Computer Communications,
Lule University of Technology

Abstract
administration.

Ad-hoc networking is a concept in computer communications, which means that

users wanting to
communicate with each other form a temporary network, without any form of centralized
Each node participating in the network acts both as host and a router and must therefore be willing to
forward packets for other nodes. For this purpose, a routing protocol is needed.

protocol.
Nodes
to
assistants and
bandwidth.

An ad-hoc network has certain characteristics, which imposes new demands on the routing
The most important characteristic is the dynamic topology, which is a consequence of node mobility.
can change position quite frequently, which means that we need a routing protocol that quickly adapts
topology changes. The nodes in an ad-hoc network can consist of laptops and personal digital
are often very limited in resources such as CPU capacity, storage capacity, battery power and
This means that the routing protocol should try to minimize control traffic, such as periodic update
messages. Instead the routing protocol should be reactive, thus only calculate routes upon receiving a
specific request.
The Internet Engineering Task Force currently has a working group named Mobile Ad-hoc Networks
that is working on routing specifications for ad-hoc networks. This master thesis evaluates some of the
protocols put forth by the working group. This evaluation is done by means of simulation using Network
simulator 2 from Berkeley.

when
very
link

The simulations have shown that there certainly is a need for a special ad-hoc routing protocol
mobility increases. More conventional routing protocols like DSDV have a dramatic decrease in
performance when mobility is high. Two of the proposed protocols are DSR and AODV. They perform
well when mobility is high. However, we have found that a routing protocol that entirely depends on
messages at the IP-level will not perform well. Some sort of support from the lower layer, for instance
failure detection or neighbor discovery is necessary for high performance.

DSR,
overhead for
desirable.

The size of the network and the offered traffic load affects protocols based on source routing, like
to some extent. A large network with many mobile nodes and high offered load will increase the
DSR quite drastically. In these situations, a hop-by-hop based routing protocol like AODV is more