Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) nodes achieve instantaneous communication through multi-hop connections without relying on infrastructure, centralized access points, or centralized administration. Different routing protocols with varying performance and mechanisms have been suggested for MANET. As a result, it is crucial to assess these methods’ performance under various conditions. To identify the most efficient routing system, this study evaluates the performance of Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) as a proactive routing protocol and Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) as reactive routing methods. The performance of these protocols was simulated and evaluated using the Network Simulator (NS) version 2.35. The protocols were evaluated based on the packet delivery ratio, average throughput, average end-to-end delay, and packet loss ratio relative to different node counts.