Routing protocols are responsible for providing reliable communication between the source and destination nodes. The performance of these protocols in the ad hoc network family is influenced by several factors such as mobility model, traffic load, transmission range, and the number of mobile nodes which represents a great issue. Several simulation studies have explored routing protocol with performance parameters, but few relate to various protocols concerning routing and quality of service (QoS) metrics. This paper presents a simulation-based comparison of proactive, reactive, and multipath routing protocols in mobile adhoc networks (MANETs). Specifically, the performance of AODV, DSDV, and AOMDV protocols are evaluated and analyzed in the presence of varying the number of mobile nodes, pause time, and traffic connection numbers. Moreover, Routing and QoS performance metrics such as normalized routing load, routing packet, packet delivery ratio, packet drop, end-to-end delay, and throughput are measured to conduct a performance comparison between three routing protocols. Simulation results indicate that AODV outperforms the DSDV and AOMDV protocols in most of the metrics. AOMDV is better than DSDV in terms of end-to-end delay. DSDV provides lower throughput performance results. Network topology parameters have a slight impact on AODV performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]