Mobile ad hoc networks are attracting attention for their potential use in several fields such as collaborative computing and communications in indoor areas. Mobility and the absence of any fixed infrastructure make MANETs very attractive for mobility and rescue operations and time-critical applications. Considering mobility of the terminals, routing is a key process for operation of MANETs. In this paper, we analyze the performance of Optimized Link State Routing protocol in an indoor environment considering different scenarios for horizontal and vertical topologies. We evaluate the scenarios based on delay and jitter metrics. The experimental results show that for vertical topology the performance is affected more by mobility and number of hops, in comparison with the horizontal topology.

Recently, a great interest is shown in MANETs potential usage and applications in several fields such as military activities, rescue operations and time-critical applications. In this work, we implement and analyse a MANET testbed considering AODV and OLSR protocols for wireless multi-hop networking. We investigate the effect of mobility and topology changing in MANET and evaluate the performance of the network through experiments in a real environment. The performance assessment of our testbed is done considering throughput, number of dropped packets and delay. We designed four scenarios: Static, Source Moving, Destination Moving and Source-Destination Moving. From our experimental results, we concluded that when the communicating nodes are moving and the routes change quickly, OLSR (as a proactive protocol) performs better than AODV, which is a reactive protocol.