Analysis of Reactive Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

A MANET is an autonomous collection of mobile users (nodes) that communicate over relatively bandwidth-constrained wireless links. The infrastructure less and the dynamic nature of these networks demands new set of networking strategies to be implemented in order to provide efficient end-to-end communication. MANETs employ the traditional TCP/IP structure to provide end-to-end communication between nodes. However, due to their mobility and the limited resource in wireless networks, each layer in the TCP/IP model require redefinition or modifications to function efficiently in MANETs. Routing in the MANETs is a challenging task and has received a tremendous amount of attention from researches. This has led to development of many different routing protocols for MANETs, which are classified in two basic categories: reactive routing and proactive routing protocols. This paper compares and analyze reactive routing protocols on the basis of various properties.