Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is an infrastructure less and decentralized network
which need a robust dynamic routing protocol. Many routing protocols for such networks have been
proposed so far to find optimized routes from source to the destination and prominent among them are
Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), and Destination-
Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) routing protocols. The performance comparison of these protocols
should be considered as the primary step towards the invention of a new routing protocol. This paper
presents a performance comparison of proactive and reactive routing protocols DSDV, AODV and DSR
based on QoS metrics (packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, throughput, and jitter),
normalized routing overhead and normalized MAC overhead by using the NS-2 simulator. In this work,
the performance comparison is conducted by varying mobility speed, a number of nodes and data rate.
The comparison results show that AODV performs optimally well not the best among all the studied
protocols.