The Impact of TCP Congestion Window Size on the Performance Evaluation of Mobile Ad Hoc (Manet) Routing Protocols

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a temporary collection of mobile nodes randomly moved within a limited terrain area. The nodes are connected to form a wireless network without use any communication infrastructure. Because of the limiting resources of MANET nodes, multiple hops scheme is proposed for data exchange across the network. Varieties of mobile ad hoc routing protocols have been developed to support the multi-hop scheme of ad hoc networks. A popular Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) provides a reliable connection in a computer network environment; it sets its congestion window size in response to the behavior of the network to achieve the best performance. This work aims to investigate and compare the MANET protocol performance, such as DSDV, AODV and DSR in terms of network throughput, average routing load, the packet delivery ratio (PDR), and average end-to-end delay by varying the maximum congestion window size. Our simulation has been implemented using a well-known NS-2.35 network simulator. The simulated results show that the demonstrates of the concepts of MANET routing protocols with respect to TCP congestion window size in MANET environment.