A comparative study of MANET routing protocols

Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile hosts forming a temporary network without the aid of any stand-alone infrastructure or centralized administration. Due to the mobility of the nodes in the network, these nodes are self-organizing and self-configuring. Not only they act as hosts, but also they function as routers. They direct data to or from other nodes in the network. In MANETs, routing protocols are necessary to find specific paths between the source and the destination. The primary goal of any ad-hoc network routing protocol is to meet the challenges of the dynamically changing topology. Therefore, an efficient route between any two nodes with minimum routing overhead and bandwidth consumption should be established. The design of these routing protocols is challenging due to the mobility and the dynamic nature of the mobile ad-hoc networks. MANET routing protocols are categorized into two types: proactive and reactive. In this paper, the MANET characteristics and challenges are highlighted. In addition, the previously mentioned categories of routing protocols, proactive and reactive, are explored. Moreover, a comparison is conducted between three protocols; namely, DSDV, DSR and AODV in terms of both properties and performance. Finally, a critical analysis is performed on some papers that discussed routing in MANET.