Abstract : Performance Analysis of Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector routing (AODV) using OPNET Simulator by Anipakala Suresh --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- An ad hoc network is an instantly deployable wireless network that does not require the services of any networking infrastructure such as base stations or routers. A key feature of these networks is their ease of deployment that makes it ideally suitable for battlefield, search and rescue and disaster relief operations. These networks can operate on a single-hop or multi-hop basis where nodes in the network are able to act as intermediaries (routers) for communications of other nodes. Nodes in these networks operate with power limited batteries, and the bandwidth is constrained as these are wireless networks. MANET (Mobile Ad hoc NETworks) which is a working group at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) focuses on developing the standards for these networks. One of the MANET standardized ad hoc networking protocols is Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector routing (AODV) which was published as a RFC in 2003 (RFC 3561). There are several implementations and simulators are available for AODV protocol. In this work, performance analysis of AODV networks using the OPNET simulator was done. AODV model was added to the OPNET simulator very recently (version 10.5 released in 2004). Several simulations of AODV networks in OPNET were done to investigate the behavior of transport layer protocols, both UDP and TCP when using in AODV networks. Results were analyzed for both UDP and TCP separately. Unidirectional video streaming was used to analyze the UDP communication, while TCP performance was analyzed using file downloads via FTP (File Transfer Protocol).