Analysis of Proactive and Reactive Manet Routing Protocols Under Selected TCP Variants

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET), with its inherent dynamic and flexible architecture, demonstrates attractive potential for military applications. It is able to overcome traditional communications limitations through its automatic relaying and self-healing/forming features. MANET nodes perform the routing functions themselves. Due to the limited wireless transmission range, the routing generally consists of multiple hops. Therefore, the nodes depend on one another to forward packets to the destinations. In a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET), temporary link failures and route changes happen frequently. With the assumption that all packet losses are due to congestion, Transport Control Protocol (TCP) performs poorly in such an environment. One problem of TCP in such environments is its inability to distinguish losses induced by the lossy wireless channel from the ones due to network congestion. Many TCP variants have been developed for the improved performance of TCP in MANET. In this research, through simulations that were carried out by using Network Simulator-2 (NS-2) , the selected MANET Routing protocols i.e. DSR and DSDV were analyzed in accordance with their finest performance of packets delivery rate, average end-to-end delay, and packet dropping, under TCP Vegas and TCP Newreno with mobility consideration. The simulation results indicate that DSDV has a better throughput performance but higher average end-to-end delay and packet drop ratio as compared to DSR