Performance Comparison and Evaluation of the Routing Protocols for MANETs Using NS3

MANETs (mobile ad hoc networks) contain wireless mobile nodes to construct dynamic networks without the support of fixed infrastructure. Its nodes and hosts are all movable and self-configurable while simultaneously serving as routers to deliver data from sources to their respective destinations. Because routers in MANETs have to cooperate efficiently to meet the performance requirements, routing algorithms play a crucial role in MANET architecture design. In the past, tremendous works have been done on comparison and evaluation of routing algorithms using NS2 (network simulator 2). This paper presents performance evaluations and analyses on the Proactive and Reactive routing protocols using NS3 (network simulator 3), a relatively newer and more advanced version of NS2. This paper will also show simulation results of evaluating the drop rate, throughput, power consumption, and end-to-end delay of MANETs. Lastly, a performance justification of said simulation results will be presented.