Significance of terrain dimension on the performance of wireless ad hoc proactive routing protocols

Wireless ad hoc networks (WANETs) enable wireless nodes to communicate without any support of fixed and centralised network as it does not follow any fixed network infrastructure, and all nodes are free to move from one place to another. Routing protocols play an important role during exchange of information between nodes. Routing is a challenging task as topology is not fixed in WANETs. Any node may move from one place to another at any point of time, and hence to predict the movement of any node at an instance is difficult. Due to this dynamic change in topology, the route establishment and its maintenance become complicated. As WANETs are not currently deployed on a large scale, terrain dimension is one of the parameters that may change the performance of routing protocols. In this paper, the performance of four proactive [BELLMAN FORD, fisheye state routing(FSR), source-tree adaptive routing (STAR) and optimised link state routing (OLSR)] routing protocols have been evaluated under varying terrain dimension with 50 randomly deployed mobile nodes. The result of the simulations shows that BELLMAN-FORD routing protocol performs better than all other routing protocols in terrain dimensions of 1, 500 m × 1, 500 m and 1, 000 m × 1, 000 m in terms of average jitter and average end-to-end delay performance metrics. However, in the case of 500 m × 500 m terrain dimension, OLSR routing protocol performs better than all other routing protocols. In terms of average throughput, STAR routing protocol performs better than all other routing protocols in small terrain dimension, whereas in large terrain dimension OLSR routing protocol performs better than all other routing protocols. Comparison also suggested that performance of proactive routing protocols is decreased as terrain dimension is increased.