Comparative Study of Location-Based Routing Protocols For MANETs

Mobile Adhoc networks gained popularity in recent years due to their unplanned nature where mobile node forms a self-organizing network without using any infrastructure like a Base station in a GSM network. Due to its dynamic topology, routing of information packets in a mobile ad-hoc network is a tedious task. Many routing protocols have been designed for MANET out of them some protocol maintains the route from every node to every other node proactively(Table driven) before their use, but at the cost of huge control overhead and some protocols constructs the path reactively (On-Demand) when the route is required between two nodes, on the cost of transmission delay. The availability of inexpensive tiny GPS receivers for determining the geographical coordinates catches the attention of researchers and provides rationalization for exploiting the geometric relationship among mobile nodes for routing decisions. Many location-based routing methods for mobile Ad-hoc networks have been developed in recent years. In this paper study of well-known location-aware routing protocols is presented along with their comparison.