On Demand Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: A Review

A mobile ad hoc network is a multihop wireless network with dynamically and frequently changing topology. The power, energy and bandwidth constraint of these self operating and self organized systems has made routing a challenging problem. Number of routing protocols has been developed to find routes with minimum control overhead and network resources. Extensions are done on the conventional protocols to improve the throughput by further reducing the control overhead. This paper gives an overview of the existing on demand routing protocols and a parametric comparison is made with the recently developed protocols, proposed in the literature, These protocols are the multipath extensions of ad hoc on demand distance vector routing protocol (AODV) such as AODV with break avoidance (AODV-BR), scalable multipath on demand routing (SMORT) etc.