Performance Analysis of On-Demand Routing Protocols in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have recently gained a lot of popularity due to their rapid deployment and instant communication capabilities. WMNs are dynamically self-organizing, self-configuring and self-healing with the nodes in the network automatically establishing an adiej hoc network and preserving the mesh connectivity. Designing a routing protocol for WMNs requires several aspects to consider, such as wireless networks, fixed applications, mobile applications, scalability, better performance metrics, efficient routing within infrastructure, load balancing, throughput enhancement, interference, robustness etc. To support communication, various routing protocols are designed for various networks (e.g. ad hoc, sensor, wired etc.). However, all these protocols are not suitable for WMNs, because of the architectural differences among the networks. In this paper, a detailed simulation based performance study and analysis is performed on the reactive routing protocols to verify the suitability of these protocols over such kind of networks. Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Dynamic MANET On-demand (DYMO) routing protocol are considered as the representative of reactive routing protocols. The performance differentials are investigated using varying traffic load and number of source. Based on the simulation results, how the performance of each protocol can be improved is also recommended.