Review of Routing Protocols and Associated Challenges in MANETs

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks allow us to overcome the obstacle of infrastructure networks. The nodes in such networks communicate with each other directly without the aid of any fixed infrastructure. Each node in such networks can act as a source or a downstream node as well as an intermediate router. Due to dynamic topological structure of these networks, designing optimum routing protocols pose a great challenge. The requirements of route designing can be certain parameters as per the application requirement. Some requirements include lower power consumption, higher data security and option for multicasting which if not optimized can degrade the network performance substantially. This paper mainly focuses on issues with routing protocols in such dynamic environment and prominent challenges faced by MANETs in Quality of Service constrained routing.