## 5 Traffic Load Patterns  
Traffic loads play a significant role in understanding the performance of routing protocols for the practical deployment and implementation of MANETs. Different traffic load patterns such as regular, irregular and joint traffic reflect real-world traffic scenarios, in which data transmission can be continuous or infrequent, or a mix of both. Therefore, the scope of this paper is to evaluate routing protocols under these conditions, in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each protocol to ensure their appropriateness for different operational conditions in real life. Throughout the literature, we have noticed that many authors focus on routing protocol behaviors against performance metrics, while variation in the applied traffic loads was limited. In this work, three types of traffic loads are implemented in the simulation \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c} \hline \hline
**Feature** & **DSR** & **AODV** \\ \hline Destination sequence number & Not utilized & Utilized \\ \hline Periodic hello messages & Not essential & Essential for link breakage discovery \\ \hline Routing mechanism & Source routing Multiple route & Table driven \\  & caches per destination & one entry per destination. \\ \hline Route storage method & Route caches & Routing tables \\ \hline Timers & Not applied & Applied \\ \hline Numerous route caches & Yes & No (path request initiated) \\ \hline Optimal route to destination & Not always & All the time \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: DSR and AODV features. environments besides the various performance metrics considered, to improve the protocol analysis and comparison. Regular or constant bit rate traffic, irregular or varying bit rate traffic and the joint bit rate traffic are the traffic streams generated in the simulation scenarios. The regular rate class that is usually used for voice and data services representation, generates traffic at a constant rate and the packet size remains fixed during the packet transmission, as shown in [24]. The source for this regular packet stream is not busy and the source is continuously transmitting throughout the connection, which means that no still periods are involved, so the entire regular traffic streams can be generated in network simulator [25]. As in [26], the second type of traffic considered is the irregular or varying rate traffic, which creates traffic alternating between two states, active and idle. Typical applications of this type are video conferencing or computer network applications. In this type, traffic is generated during the active state at a fixed rate, while no stream is shown during the idle period. The duration of both periods is exponentially distributed and independent. By determining the average of both active and idle periods, diverse computations can be achieved, which are important in traffic modeling. We can use the burstiness nature of irregular traffic to indicate how occasionally a source initiates traffic. To create an irregular type using a network simulator, the traffic scenario is generated manually using exponential traffic and during active periods, and packets are generated at a fixed burst rate. Regarding the source destination pair, the packet size changes randomly according to exponential distribution. The third type of traffic that created in the simulation scenarios, is the joint traffic pattern examined in [27; 28]. This class is a mixture of regular and irregular data types. In joint traffic, we decided that irregular traffic represents most of a source stream while regular traffic represents less than quarter of the total generated traffic load. In our study, three distinct traffic load patterns were employed: regular, irregular and joint traffic. Regular traffic indicates scenarios where a steady data flow is required, for example in continuous monitoring applications. Irregular traffic represents sudden torrents of data transmission, typically in emergency communications, as in catastrophes.