A study on routing overhead in dense MANET

MANET is formed by mobile nodes that have limited battery and CPU power. Since there are no dedicated routers, every mobile node is expected to route (or relay) packets on behalf of other nodes. This is true irrespective of the routing protocols they use in the network. Due non-deterministic nature of the network topology, some nodes are expected to route more packets than other nodes. Nodes that route more packets will rapidly loose their battery life and die soon. This may result in a disconnected topology with several isolated nodes. In this short paper, we make a detailed study on the impact of routing load under various network scenarios.