A survey of reactive routing protocols in MANET

Mobile Ad-hoc network (MANET) is a dynamic wireless network in which each mobile node acts as a router. MANETs do not have any fixed network topology. The connection is established between the mobile nodes whenever the nodes need to exchange data. The connection is terminated as soon as the exchanging of data is completed. Routing in such a dynamic environment is a critical task. All these complexities are handled by the routing protocols. Routing protocols are the key component for communication among mobile nodes. The performance of routing protocols directly affects the performance of network. Performance of routing protocols is measured in terms of various qualitative and quantitative metrics. For better performance of Ad-hoc networks it is necessary to optimize the routing protocols. The AODV routing protocol is the most prominent among the reactive routing protocols. This survey paper provides the comparative analysis of AODV, AODV-UU, AOMDV, DSR and DYMO protocols.