In the evolving landscape of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), the performance evaluation of routing protocols under voice communication scenarios is crucial to ensure Quality of Service (QoS). This study investigates the comparative performance of five prominent routing protocols—Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA), Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), and Geographic Routing Protocol (GRP)—using voice-specific QoS parameters. The simulation was carried out using the OPNET Modeler tool, renowned for its precision in network modeling and analysis. The evaluation metrics include voice delay, Mean Opinion Score (MOS), packet retransmission rate, jitter, and throughput. These parameters directly impact the user experience in real-time voice communication, making them critical for protocol assessment. A consistent simulation environment was maintained across all protocols, ensuring uniformity in node density, mobility patterns, traffic type, and simulation duration. Our results indicate that GRP, exhibits superior performance in terms of lower jitter and consistent throughput due to its periodic route updates, which ensure faster packet delivery. DSR and AODV, being reactive protocols, perform moderately well with AODV demonstrating balanced throughput and acceptable delay. GRP, leveraging geographic positioning, showed promising results in terms of reduced delay but exhibited variability in MOS. TORA, although designed for dynamic topologies, underperformed in voice delay and jitter due to frequent route maintenance overheads. Conclusively, OLSR emerged as the most suitable protocol for voice traffic in MANETs under the given simulation parameters, providing an optimal trade-off among the evaluated metrics.

In this thesis, we evaluated the performance of five prominent MANET routing protocols—AODV, OLSR, TORA, GRP, and DSR—based on key QoS metrics: packet retransmission, throughput, voice packet delay, jitter, and Mean Opinion Score (MOS). The comprehensive simulation and analysis revealed that each protocol exhibits distinct strengths and weaknesses across different performance parameters. Among the protocols, AODV demonstrated exceptional throughput, significantly outperforming others, making it highly suitable for data-intensive applications. TORA and GRP excelled in voice-related metrics, such as jitter and MOS, achieving the highest MOS values of 3.57 and the lowest jitter, indicating excellent voice quality and user satisfaction. GRP also recorded the lowest voice packet delay (0.01 seconds), enhancing its suitability for real-time communication. OLSR offered a balanced performance, especially in voice delay and jitter, while DSR underperformed in most areas, particularly in delay and MOS, suggesting limited suitability for voice services. When compared to the baseline results from the referenced base paper, our study achieved improved outcomes across all metrics. This improvement underscores the effectiveness of our simulation setup and reinforces the potential of selecting optimal protocols based on application-specific requirements. Our work provides a strong foundation for deploying MANETs in real-world scenarios such as disaster recovery, military communication, and mobile conferencing, where performance consistency is critical.

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