Comparative Study of Reactive Routing Protocols for MANETs
V. V. Rama Prasad · 2012
The mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is an autonomous system of mobile routers connected by wireless links. The routers are free to move randomly and organize themselves arbitrarily; thus, the network's wireless topology may change rapidly and unpredictably. The infrastructureless and the dynamic nature of these networks demands new set of networking strategies to be implemented in order to provide efficient end-to-end communications in many different scenarios such as battlefield and disaster recovery. MANETs employs the traditional TCP/IP structure between the nodes to provide end-to-end communication. However, due to their mobility and limited resources in wireless networks, the TCP/IP model requires redefinition or modifications in each layer to function efficiently in MANETs. One interesting research area in MANET is routing. This has led to development of many different routing protocols for MANETs and each author of each proposed protocol argues that the strategy proposed provides an improvement over a number of different strategies consider in the literature for a given network scenarios. Therefore, it is quite different to determine which protocols may perform best under a number of different network scenarios, such as increasing node density and traffic. In this paper, we provide an overview of a wide range of reactive routing protocols proposed in the literature. We also provide a performance comparison of all reactive routing protocols and suggest which protocols may perform best in large networks.