Empirical Evaluation of Routing Protocol Performance in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks for Public Safety Applications in Nigeria

Mobile ad hoc networks can provide self-organizing, infrastructure-independent communication for public safety operations in scenarios where conventional telecommunications infrastructure is unavailable or destroyed. Selecting the appropriate routing protocol is critical to MANET performance under the mobility and traffic conditions characteristic of emergency response operations. This study empirically evaluates the performance of AODV, DSDV, OLSR, and DSR routing protocols in MANET configurations representative of public safety applications in Nigerian emergency response scenarios, including post-flood operations in Kebbi State and post-conflict community restoration in Borno State. Simulations were conducted in NS-3 using mobility models derived from GPS traces of actual emergency response vehicle movements provided by the National Emergency Management Agency. Performance metrics including packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, routing overhead, and network throughput were measured across node densities of 20, 40, and 80 nodes for both vehicular and pedestrian mobility patterns. OLSR achieved the highest packet delivery ratio of 91.3% in high-node-density pedestrian scenarios due to its proactive topology maintenance. AODV outperformed other protocols in sparse vehicular networks, achieving 87.6% delivery ratio with 40% lower routing overhead than OLSR. DSDV was consistently outperformed in high-mobility scenarios. The study provides empirically grounded protocol selection guidance for public safety MANET deployments in Nigerian emergency management contexts, contributing a locally parameterized comparative dataset absent from existing literature. Keywords: MANET, routing protocol, public safety communication, AODV, OLSR.