Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have received significant attention in recent years due to their importance in intelligent transportation systems. These networks enable communication between vehicles (V2V) and between vehicles and infrastructure (V2I) using wireless access technologies such as IEEE 1609 WAVE and IEEE 802.11p. A critical scientific challenge in implementing VANETs, particularly in urban environments, is the development of efficient and reliable routing protocols for packet transmission between nodes. In this paper simulate and evaluate the performance of three widely recognized routing protocols, namely Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), in the context of VANETs. The objective is to identify the most suitable routing protocol that ensures reliable dissemination of data packets. To accomplish this, existing topology-based routing protocols for VANET applications are assessed using the Qualnet simulation tool. The simulation results indicate that combining an appropriate channel model with an efficient routing protocol enhances the link throughput of VANETs when considering a fixed network size. Furthermore, the performance evaluation investigates the impact of network sizes and routing protocols on important metrics such as packet loss, packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, and overhead transmission.