Simulation Study of MANET Routing Protocols Under FTP Traffic

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) use many different routing protocols to route data packets between nodes. The performance of these routing protocols has been widely studied and evaluated. However, previous studies evaluate the performance of routing protocols using traffic generators that do not correspond to specific applications. Additionally, the scenarios used in previous research are rather simple and do not correspond to real and complex situations, where various types of traffic coexist in the network. We study the performance of proactive and reactive routing protocols when specific application traffic exists in the network. A number of nodes need to receive large data files from the same source node, using File Transfer Protocol (FTP), while other non-specific application traffic also exists in the network, thus comprising a complex and more real-like scenario. We examine the generic case where the data to be transferred is different for each destination node, so multicasting algorithms cannot be used. By executing several simulations, we conclude that the type of the traffic load in the network plays an important role on the performance and operation of the most popular routing protocols used in MANETs, regardless of the mobility model employed by the relay nodes.