A study and comparison of OLSR, AODV and TORA routing protocols in ad hoc networks

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes in which the wireless links are frequently broken down due to mobility and dynamic infrastructure. Routing is a significant issue and challenge in ad hoc networks. Many routing protocols have been proposed like OLSR, AODV, DSR, ZRP, and TORA so far to improve the routing performance and reliability. This research paper describes the characteristics of ad hoc routing protocols OLSR, AODV and TORA based on the performance metrics like packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, routing overload by increasing number of nodes in the network. This comparative study proves that AODV, TORA performs well in dense networks than OLSR in terms of packet delivery ratio.