Analysis of the effect of application traffic load variation on the throughput performance of MANETs

Abstract

The advancement of sophisticated mobile and computing devices has led to the emergence of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) in which autonomous mobile users (nodes) are connected through wireless links to build a live and on-the-fly network without any pre-existing network. The nodes involved in the MANETs act as both routers and hosts and the network topology varies dynamically due to mobility of the nodes. Therefore, the performance of MANETs is affected by different parameters such as mobility speed, bandwidth, application traffic load and the protocols used. In this paper, the effect of application traffic load variation on the throughput performance of MANET networks is studied based on DSR and AODV protocols using. OPNET 14.5 simulator was used to study how the throughput behaves in Low, Medium and High FTP
traffic loads. Analysis of simulation results has shown that the throughput increases as the FTP traffic load is increased in both AODV and DSR based MANETs. A maximum increment, however, is observed in the DSR based MANET.