Abstract:
An Ad-hoc wireless network is a concept in communications where users communicate with each others by forming a network without an infrastructure or centralized administration. Each node participating in the network acts as both a host and a router and must therefore is willing to forward packets for other nodes. The most important characteristic of ad-hoc wireless network is the dynamic topology, which is a consequence of node mobility. The nodes in an ad-hoc wireless network are often very limited by their resources such as their CPU capacity, storage capacity, battery power and bandwidth. Routing protocols specifications for ad-hoc wireless networks are needed that take these resource limits into
account. In this study performance metrics were evaluated in simulations using Network Simulator 2. The simulations
showed that DSDV, a proactive routing protocol, had a dramatic decrease in performance when mobility was high. Two
reactive routing protocols: DSR and AODV were also evaluated. DSR and AODV performed well because they were
designed to support dynamic topologies. AODV had better characteristic in relation to bandwidth consumption than the
DSR protocol when we created variations in the simulation network load. For a real world experiment, we implemented 4 nodes using the AODV-UU protocol at the Research and
Development Center on the 7th floor of the Faculty of Information Technology, King Mongkuts Institute of Technology
North Bangkok. We simulated conference activity. Successful delivery of PING packets was 100 percent, however round
trip time was longer when the number of hops was increased, which resulted in a limit in size of the network. The biggest
problem we encountered in testing was due to a characteristic of the AODV protocol not supporting uni-directional links
and wireless communication in a gray zone, in such a case the successful delivery of packets was reduced to 75 percent in
roaming scenarios.