The primary goal of this study is to investigate and evaluate the performance of wireless Ad-Hoc routing protocols using the OPNET simulation tool, as well as to recommend the most effective routing strategies for the wireless mesh environment. Investigations have been testified to analyze the performance of the reactive and proactive Ad-Hoc routing protocols in different scenarios. Application and wireless metrics were configured that were used to test and evaluate the performance of routing protocols. The application metric includes web browsing metrics such as HTTP page response time, voice and video metrics such as end-to-end delay, and delay variation. The wireless network metrics include wireless media access delay, data dropped, wireless load, wireless retransmission attempts, and Packet Delivery Ratio. The simulations results show that the AODV overcome DSR and OLSR in terms of PDR (76%), wireless load (22.692 Mbps), voice delay variation (102.685 ms), HTTP page response time (15.317 sec), voice and video packet end-to-end delay (206.527 and 25.294 ms), wireless media access delay (90.150 ms), data dropped (10.003 Mbps), wireless load (22.692 Mbps), and wireless retransmission attempts (0.392 packets).
Non-ideal channel conditions degrade the performance of wireless networks due to the occurrence of frame errors. Most of the well-known works compute the saturation throughput and packet delay for the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) protocol with the assumption that transmission is carried out via an ideal channel (i.e., no channel bit errors or hidden stations), and/or the errors exist only in data packets. Besides, there are no considerations for transmission errors in the control frames (i.e., Request to Send (RTS), Clear to Send (CTS), and Acknowledgement (ACK)). Considering the transmission errors in the control frames adds complexity to the existing analysis for the wireless networks. In this paper, an analytical model to evaluate the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer saturation throughput and packet delay of the IEEE 802.11g and IEEE 802.11n protocols in the presence of both collisions and transmission errors in a non-ideal wireless channel is provided. The derived analytical expressions reveal that the saturation throughput and packet delay are affected by the network size (n), packet size, minimum backoff window size (W min ), maximum backoff stage (m), and bit error rate (BER). These results are important for protocol optimization and network planning in wireless networks .