Mobile ad hoc networks are type of wireless networks in which any kind of infrastructure is not used, i.e. there are no infrastructures such as routers or switches or anything else on the network that can be used to support the network structure and the nodes has mobility. The routing is particularly a challenging task in MANETs that selecting paths in a network along which to send network traffic. In this paper, the performance analysis is carried out on Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV), Limited Hop Count AODV (LHC-AODV), Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR), Unnecessary Loop OLSR (UL-OLSR) and Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) protocols using NS2 simulator. The delay, throughput, and packet delivery ratio are the three common measures used for the comparison of the performance of above protocols.

The AODV protocol is based on the minimum delay path as its route selection criteria, regardless of the paths load. This issue leads to unbalanced load dissemination in the network and the energy of the nodes on the shortest path deplete earlier than others. We proposed an improved AODV protocol with limited TTL (Time to Live) of RREP packet in which the route reply (RREP) packet of AODV is modified to limite TTL information of nodes. Experiments have been carried out using network simulator software (NS2). Simulation results show that our proposed routing protocol outperforms regular AODV in terms of packet delivery rate, good put, throughput, and jitter.