Evaluating Performance of OLSR Routing Protocol for Multimedia Traffic in MANET Using NS2

MANET is a set of wireless mobile stations which creates a short-term network without any backbone or centralized infrastructure. In today's world, large portion of traffic on the Internet carries TCP traffic due to real-time and non-real time multimedia traffic. Internet traffic has completely different properties than that of CBR (constant bit rate) traffic, which is the most generally evaluated traffic in MANET. In this work, we compared and evaluated performance of four MANET routing protocols under various CBR and TCP traffic patterns in NS2. We found that there is a significant performance differences between various routing protocols due to differences in its internal mechanisms. The performance is evaluated on the basis of metrics like Delivery Rate, End-to-end Delay and Throughput. Finally it is concluded that for CBR traffic, AODV (reactive) protocol performs better than rest of routing protocols while for TCP traffic, OLSR (proactive) protocol performs better that rest of routing protocols. So as far as multimedia/TCP traffic is concerned in MANET which is actually major part of total traffic on internet, OLSR is evaluated as a best routing protocol in all respect and found better suited for transporting TCP traffic.