International Journal of Future Computer and Communication, Vol. 5, No.

1, February 2016

Performance Evaluation of AODV, DSR, OLSR, and GRP

MANET Routing Protocols Using OPNET
Adel Aneiba and Mohammed Melad

 having nodes which can act as a transmitter, router or receiver.


Abstract—Routing is a critical issue in MANET and MANETs have a dynamic topology where nodes are mobile.
therefore, this is the focus of this paper, along with the To monitor the workings of these nodes and the nature in
performance analysis of its routing protocols. In this paper the which they behave while sending, receiving or forwarding
performance of four MANET routing protocols (AODV, DSR,
data is classified by a set of rules known as routing protocols
OLSR and GRP) are compared. To evaluate and validate the
performance of these protocols, a feasibility study in the form of [5].
simulations were carried out. In these experiments, the four In this paper, four major MANET routing protocols
protocols were tested under different scenarios and (AODV, DSR, OLSR and GRP) have been evaluated. The
circumstances using a simulation tool called OPNET. The evaluation process is based on the rate of FTP (High load)
performance of these routing protocols is analyzed based on two traffic; and also by increasing the number of nodes in
performance metrics: delay and through put. The simulation
different scenarios to assess the performance of each protocol.
results have shown that on average, under heavy FTP traffic
condition, the OLSR protocol outperforms the other three The performance is analyzed by means of delay and
protocols with respect to the mentioned metrics under two throughput using OPNET Modeler 14.0.The first two
scenarios (20 and 80 mobile nodes) that have been created in protocols are selected from Proactive category namely OLSR,
OPNET. GRP and the second set (of protocol) is selected from the
Reactive category –AODV, DSR.
Index Terms—FTP, MANET, OPNET, routing protocols. OPNET provides several MANET routing protocol
models which are integrated with the IP and wireless LAN
models. In addition, a MANET framework is available for
I. INTRODUCTION rapid development of new MANET protocol models.Various
The emergence of wireless networks has gone a long way dedicated routing protocols have been proposed to the
in solving the growing service demands. The focus of Internet Engineering task Force (IETF) MANET Working
research and development endeavor has almost shifted from Group. Some of these protocols have been studied and their
wired networks to wireless networks. The limitations of performances have been analysed with details. OPNET
wireless network techniques such as high error rate, power support the following routing protocols (AODV, DSR, OLSR,
restrictions, bandwidth limitations and other constraints have OPSFv3, TORA and GRP).
not deterred the growth of wireless networks [1]. Mobile The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section II,
Ad-hoc network (MANET) is one of the most demanding describes the related work. Section III illustrates the
field in the area of wireless network simulation environment. In Section IV, the selected
MANET consist of mobile devices or users which are performance metrics are described. Section V and Section VI,
generally known as nodes, and each one of which is equipped present the simulation scenarios and results respectively.
with a radio transmitter and a receiver [2]. MANET is a Section VI analyze the results. Section VII concludes the
temporary network of wireless mobile nodes which has no paper.
fixed infrastructure. There are no dedicated routers, servers,
access points, base stations and cables [3]. The mobile nodes
which are within each other’s transmission range can II. RELATED WORK
communicate with each other directly; or else, other nodes in Secondary research has been conducted to identify the gap
between can forward the packets if the source and the that may exist in the literature regarding the performance of
destination node are ―out‖ of each other’s range. Every node mobile ad-hoc routing protocols. This is done through
acts as a router to forward the packets to other nodes investigating and evaluating several related academic
whenever required [4]. One of the main areas of research is research papers and studies in this area. To the best
the packet routing technology, which is the focus of this knowledge of authors, none of the addressed related work has
paper. investigated and produced quantitative results showing the
Mobile ad-hoc network is ―infrastructure-less networks‖ performance of AODV, DSR, OLSR, and GRP under
different number of nodes which make this research novel.
For instance, [6] presents Ad-hoc On Demand Distance
Manuscript received October 21, 2015; revised December 25, 2015. This Vector Routing (AODV), a novel algorithm for the routing
work was fully funded by the University of Benghazi through the Faculty of operation of such ad-hoc networks. Their routing algorithm is
Information Technology research budget. The authors would like to thank
the staff at computer networks lab for their support and assistance with this quite suitable for a dynamic self-starting network, as required
project. by users wishing to utilize ad-hoc networks. They show their
The authors are with the Benghazi University, Libya (e-mail: algorithm can scale to large populations of mobile nodes
[email protected], [email protected]).

doi: 10.18178/ijfcc.2016.5.1.444 57
 International Journal of Future Computer and Communication, Vol. 5, No. 1, February 2016

wishing to form ad-hoc networks. In addition, they present environment settings.

their evaluation methodology and simulation results to verify In this simulation the Random waypoint mobility was used
the operation of the proposed algorithm. as the model for simulation exercise. Random mobility used,
While [7] proposes an adaptive multi-mode routing shows more behaviour, good mobility and it was simple to
framework that has multiple compatible modes of operation. use [10]. 100 m/s was used as a constant speed for mobile
Based on this framework, an adaptive protocol has been nodes movement until these nodes reached the destination,
implemented with the novel feature that individual nodes can 200 second was used as a ―pause-time‖ and after that it will
adapt their mode of operation at any moment, while an search and choose a new destination randomly. Table I shows
overall consistent state of the routing tables is maintained. the simulation parameters.
Through simulation, the correct behavior of the protocol
TABLE I: SIMULATION PARAMETERS
during mode switches is demonstrated and it is shown that the
protocol is capable of minimally offering the performance of Simulation Parameter Value
either proactive or reactive routing. Ref. [8] is focusing on Number of Nodes 20 and 80.
energy aspect of mobile ad hoc routing protocols. This work
Simulation Time 1 hour (3600 (sec)).
discuss the power consumption aspect of the MANET
routing protocols. A performance comparison of Dynamic Simulation Area 1000 × 1000 (m × m).
Source Routing (DSR) and Ad hoc On-Demand Distance
Routing Protocols AODV,DSR, OLSR, GRP.
Vector (AODV) routing protocols with respect to average
energy consumption and routing energy consumption are Mobility Model Random waypoint.
explained thoroughly.
Data Rate 11 mbps.
Ref. [9] is performing a performance study for several
mobile ad hoc routing protocols. Many routing protocols Application FTP (High load).
have been proposed like OLSR, AODV, DSR, ZRP, and Simulation Metrics Delay and throughput
TORA so far to improve the routing performance and
reliability. The paper describes the characteristics of ad hoc
routing protocols OLSR, AODV and TORA based on the
performance metrics like packet delivery ratio, end-to-end IV. PERFORMANCE METRICS
delay, routing overload by increasing number of nodes in the According to [4], [6]-[9] it is possible to evaluate the
network. The study concludes that AODV, TORA performs performance of MANET protocols with respect to several
well in dense networks than OLSR in terms of packet quality attributes, both performance-related attributes and the
delivery ratio. more general quality attributes, such as scalability. The
following performance-related metrics have been identified
as important for MANET routing protocols. These
III. SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT performance metrics will show the efficiency of MANET
OPNET modeller v14.0 has been used as a simulation tool routing protocols. The performance is analysed by means of
to implement these sets of experiments as seen in Fig. 1. Two delay and throughput using the OPNET Modeler 14.0.
major scenarios have been created, one is for 20 nodes, and Delay (sec): It is the ratio of time difference between every
the second scenario is one for 80 nodes. These scenarios were packet sent and received to the total time difference over the
used to assess the performance of these four routing protocols total number of packets received. Throughput (bit/sec) is
with different number of users with heavy FTP traffic for defined as the ratio of total data reaches a receiver from the
both scenarios. In addition, the delay and throughput are the sender – the time it takes by the receiver to receive the last
key metrics given in these experiments. message [11]. Throughput is expressed as bytes or bits per
sec (byte/sec or bit/sec). Throughput can be mathematically
expressed as in (1)

𝑁𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑝𝑎𝑐𝑘𝑒𝑡 ∗𝑃𝑎𝑐𝑘𝑒𝑡 𝑠𝑖𝑧𝑒 ×8

Troughput = 𝑡𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑑𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑖𝑚𝑢𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 (1)

V. SIMULATION SCENARIOS
Various environmental scenarios, identified in Table II,
will be used to measure the efficiency of the fourth routing
protocols.This study compare four routing protocols, over
extensive scenarios, varying node mobility and heavy FTP
traffic load. All the traffic sources used in our simulations
Fig. 1. Simulation environment.
generated constant bitrate (CBR) data traffic.
In this experiment, the simulation time was set to 3600 Scenario A investigates how these four MANET routing
second for each scenario. The required results were collected protocols behave under a heavy FTP traffic with respect to
based on the selected metrics (Delay and Throughput). DES the delay and the throughput and 20 nodes.
(global discrete event statistics) are collected on each Scenario B investigates how these four protocols perform
scenario. Table I summarizes the various simulation under a heavy FTP traffic and 80 nodes with respect to the

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 International Journal of Future Computer and Communication, Vol. 5, No. 1, February 2016

delay and throughputs. than DSR, whereas GRP and OLSR have the least delay and
showed little differences between them. Finally, it has been
TABLE II: EVALUATION SCENARIOS
found that OLSR is the best protocol during the delay
Traffic Setting (FTP Heavy Traffic) (beginning at the fifth minute after start). After that it can be
Nodes Num.

seen that GRP and OLSR have the same values.

Scenario A ( 20 Nodes)

Scenario B (80 Nodes)

VI. EXPERIMENT RESULT

The results have been divided into two sets based on the
above scenarios as presented in Table II. The graphs of
results are presented in a two-dimensional Cartesian plane
where the x-axis represents the temporal progression of the
simulation and the y-axis represents the relevant performance
metric. Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 show the delay for the 20 and 80
nodes scenarios respectively.

AODV DSR GRP OLSR

Fig. 4. Wireless LAN delay under 80 nodes.

Under the 20 nodes scenario and with regard to the

throughput metric, the OLSR clearly has a highest throughput
as seen in Fig. 4, Whereas DSR has the lowest, while AODV
and GRP have a medium throughput. This result shows
clearly that the OLSR outperforms the other protocols.
Fig. 5 shows clearly that OLSR has the highest throughput
again under 80 nodes, so it is the best protocol compared to
the other examined routing protocols. This is followed by
AODV, then GRP and the least throughput is DSR (for this
scenario).
AODV DSR GRP OLSR
Fig. 2. Wireless LAN delay under 20 nodes.

As seen in Fig. 2, OLSR has the least delay while AODV

has almost similar characteristic to OLSR but it is larger than
OLSR in terms of value average; whereas GRP has a medium
delay as compared to DSR which has the highest delay than
the other routing protocols. This concludes that OLSR has the
lowest delay and performs better than the other routing
protocols.

AODV DSR GRP OLSR

Fig. 5. Wireless LAN throughput under 80 nodes.

VII. RESULTS ANALYSIS

According to the obtained results, the authors were able to
answer the question ―which routing protocol performed the
best?‖ – As can be seen from the above graphs and Table III,
OLSR is the best protocol for all scenarios, during the delay
AODV DSR GRP OLSR and the throughput simulations for the 20 and 80 nodes
Fig. 3. Wireless LAN throughput under 20 nodes.
scenarios. The four experiments yielded results of similar
patterns and characteristics. The graphs of results are
Fig. 3 shows that DSR has the highest delay during presented in a two-dimensional Cartesian plane where the
simulation time (ST). AODV shown here has a delay but less x-axis represents the temporal progression of the simulation

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 International Journal of Future Computer and Communication, Vol. 5, No. 1, February 2016

and the y-axis represents the relevant performance metric. eventually be reflected in the reduction of the overall delivery
As seen from the graph (Fig. 3), the OLSR protocol in time as indicated by the graph; which can be attributed to the
general performs slightly better at reducing the delay for fact that OLSR uses the concept of Multipoint Relays (MPR)
transmitting data packet than the other protocols. This to reduce the possible overhead in the network. Table III lists
reduction in the delay is due to the working mechanisms of the obtained result which clearly indicates that OLSR
the OLSR over the other protocols [12], which lead to a protocol is given high throughputs and less delay over the
speeding-up of the content delivery process. This will other protocols.

TABLE III: SUMMARY OF EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

Nod. Metrics AODV DSR OLSR GRP
Delay(sec) 0.00206 0.00647 0.00135 0.00434
20 Throughput (bit/sec) 301,146 214,124 456,106 299,136
Delay(sec) 0.00213 0.04267 0.00298 0.00198
80 Throughput (bit/sec) 462,198 265,894 1,658,467 345,319

networks,‖ presented at 3rd IEEE Conference on Electronics Computer

Technology (ICECT 2011), April 8-10.
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This paper presents an evaluation study of four major ―Throughput-delay trade-off in wireless networks,‖ in Proc.
Twenty-Third Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and
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network operators and mobile applications developers with [11] U. T. Nguyen and X. Xiong, ―Rate-adaptive multicast in mobile ad-hoc
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protocols can help to enhance the end-user experience. In Computing, Networking And Communications, (WiMob'2005), vol. 3,
pp. 352, 360, Aug. 22-24, 2005.
addition, routing protocols have an important effect on the [12] M. Ilyas, The Handbook of Ad Hoc Wireless Networks, CRC Press,
overall performance of the mobile applications which use 2003.
MANET as a business network [13]-[15]. [13] C. Samara, E. Karapistoli, and A. A. Economides, ―Performance
comparison of MANET routing protocols based on real-life scenarios,‖
The simulation results have indicated that OLSR in general in Proc. 4th International Congress on Ultra-Modern
performed better than the other three protocols (ADOV, GRP, Telecommunications and Control Systems and Workshops (ICUMT),
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[14] M. Sudip, I. Woungang, and S. Misra, Guide to Wireless ad Hoc
FTP traffic. In other words, OLSR can be considered as the Networks, Springer, January 2009.
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Communication Networks, pp. 123, 128, April 2-5, 2012.
applications that need high throughput and less delay.
Furthermore, the results support the intuitive expectations of Adel Aneiba was born on December 9, 1974, in
OLSR behaviour which has been proven in [12]. Benghazi, Libya. He finished his all study stages
from primary to high school in Benghazi. In 1997, he
graduated from University of Benghazi in computer
science and then moved to the UK in 2001 to study
REFERENCE an MSc in e-commerce at Staffordshire University.
During his MSc course, he had done six month
[1] S. K. Sarkar, T. G. Basavaraju, and C. Puttamadappa, ―Ad hoc mobile placement at Stratascan LTD, UK as a software
wireless networks: Principles, protocols and applications,‖ Auerbach developer. In 2003, he obtained the MSc with merit
Publications, 2008. and achieved first ranking on his MSc course. In 2004, he had been awarded
[2] R. Ramanathan and J. Redi, ―A brief overview of ad hoc networks: a PhD scholarship from Staffordshire University in mobile computing area.
Challenges and directions,‖ Communications Magazine, vol. 40, no. 5, In 2008, he finished his PhD and joined the UNSECO as a deputy director of
pp. 20, 22, May 2002. Tripoli Project Office (TPO). The project aim was to develop an information
[3] A. Ran, J.-X. Qu, and X.-J. Sha, ―MANET routing protocols network for high education institutions in Libya.
comparison for composite traffic network,‖ in Proc. Third At the end of 2010, he joined Benghazi University as computer network
International Conference onInstrumentation, Measurement, Computer, lecturer and researcher, teaching several modules such as network evaluation
Communication and Control (IMCCC), no. 1363, 1366, pp. 21-23, and management, mobile computing, mobile commerce and web
Sept. 2013. technologies. In addition, he is supervising many BSc and MSc students. His
[4] D. R. Cañas, L. J. G. Villalba, A. L. S. Orozco, and T. Kim, ―Adaptive research interests are in the areas of internet of things, mobile robotics,
routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks,‖ Journal of Computing, computer networks simulation and evaluation, web technologies. He is a
Springer Vienna, vno. 96, p. 9, 2004. member of IEEE society and Libyan Information Communication
[5] A. D. Kadam and S. S. Wagh, ―Evaluating MANET routing protocols Technology society (LICT).
under multimedia traffic,‖ in Proc. Fourth International Conference
on Computing, Communications and Networking Technologies Mohammed Melad was born on May 12, 1990 in
(ICCCNT), pp. 1, 5, July 4-6, 2013. Almraj city, Libya. He finished his high school in
[6] C. Perkins, E. Belding-Royer, and S. Das, ―Ad hoc on-demand distance 2008 with excellent marks and he secured a place at
vector (AODV) routing,‖ IETF RFC3561, Nokia Research Center, University of Benghazi, Faculty of Information
July 2003. Technology. In 2013, He received his bachelor of
[7] L. Larry and B.S. Davie, ―Computer networks — A system approach,‖ computer science in field computer networks and
The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Networking, Fifth Edition, David communication. His research interest is around
Clark, M.I.T. 2003. computer networks performance and simulation, Web
[8] M. Barati, K. Atefi, F. Khosravi, and Y. A. Daftari, ―Performance technologies, and mobile computing. He is a member
evaluation of energy consumption for AODV and DSR routing of Libyan Information Communication Technology society (LICT). He
protocols in MANET,‖ International Conference on Computer & graduated at the top of his batch,upon graduation, he has been award a full
Information Science (ICCIS),‖ vol. 2, pp. 636, 642, June 12-14, 2012. scholarship for postgraduate study in the area of computer networks from the
[9] P. Kuppusamy, K. Thirunavukkarsu, and B. Kalavathi, ―A study and Libyan government.
comparison of OLSR, AODV and TORA routing protocols in ad hoc

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