Mobile Intelligence

1.6 CONCLUSION

We have reviewed several key protocols for routing in mobile ad hoc networks. However, this review is not comprehensive as we have left many other protocols from our discussion due to limitation of space. One such class of protocols is the class of position-based routing protocols [20], where each node knows the locations of all the other nodes through a location service such as global positioning system (GPS). It can be shown that the overheads of reactive protocols can be reduced considerably in this class of protocols. We refer the reader to the review article by Stojmenovic [20] for more details.

We conclude this chapter by briefly discussing how the MANET routing protocols are evaluated in terms of their performance, such as throughput and latency in packet delivery. Since a real evaluation of a protocol through deploying mobile nodes is expensive, most such evaluations are done through simulations in a discrete event simulator. The network simulator [12] or ns-2 has become the most popular simulator in the research community for this purpose. ns-2 has been developed for over a decade by volunteers who are researchers and PhD students in different universities worldwide and it is still in the process of development with new protocols and features being added every year. It is written in C++, one of the most popular object-oriented programming languages. The protocols discussed in this chapter are usually evaluated under the random waypoint model of mobility ...