A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is an
independent assortment of mobile users that communicate over
moderately bandwidth constrained wireless links. MANET’s
topology is dynamic that can change rapidly because the nodes
move freely and can organize themselves randomly; has the
advantage of being quickly deployable. Although numerous
routing protocols have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks,
there is no universal scheme that works well in scenarios with
different network sizes, traffic loads and node mobility patterns, so
mobile ad hoc routing protocol election presents a great
challenge. In this paper, an attempt has been made to compare
the performance of three routing protocols in Mobile Ad-hoc
Networks – Ad-Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV),
Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Destination Sequenced
Distance Vector (DSDV). We have evaluated the performance of
these routing protocols with varying the number of mobile nodes
and packet sizes on the basis of four important metrics such as
packet delivery ratio, average end to end delay, normalized
routing overhead and throughput. Network Simulator version
2.35 (NS-2.35) is used as the simulation tool for evaluating these
performance metrics. The outcome of this research shows that
AODV protocol outperforms DSDV and DSR protocols.