Abstract: This work, focuses on performance evaluation of reactive, proactive and hybrid MANET routing protocols, namely AODV, DSR, OLSR and GRP. OLSR is designed to work in a completely distributed manner and does not depend on any central entity. The AODV protocol consists of two important mechanisms, Route Discovery and Route Maintenance. It is designed to be self-creating in an environment of mobile nodes, withstanding a variety of network behaviours such as a node movement, link failures and packet losses. The GRP is not so much a distinct protocol as it provides a framework for other protocols. The research is carried out using discrete event simulation environment software known as OPNET Modeller version 14.5. It is one of the most widely used commercial simulators based on Microsoft Windows platform and incorporates more MANET routing parameters as compared to other commercial simulators available. Network performance is evaluated in terms of end-to-end delay, retransmission attempts, network load and throughput. Simulation results shows that the overall performance of proactive protocols performs better than both reactive and hybrid protocols. It is concluded that proactive protocols and hybrid protocols performs better in the case of end-to-end delay. If the performance of the network is evaluated on the basis of the network load, AODV performs better than the DSR, OLSR and GRP.

Keywords: HTTP Heavy browsing, Mobile Ad hoc Networks, OPNET, Mobitiy Models, Routing Protocols.