Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: A Review

The 1990s have seen a rapid growth of research interests in mobile ad hoc networking. The infrastructureless 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. This, along with the diverse application of these networks in many different scenarios such as battlefield and disaster recovery, has seen MANETs being researched by many different organizations and institutes. 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 requires redefinition or modifications to function efficiently in MANETs. One interesting research area in MANET is routing. 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, and each author of each proposed protocol argues that the strategy proposed provides an improvement over a number of different strategies considered in the literature for a given network scenario. Therefore, it is quite difficult to determine which protocols may perform best under a number of different network scenarios, such as increasing node density and traffic. In this paper, we provide an overview of a wide range of routing protocols proposed in the literature. We also provide a performance comparison of all routing protocols and suggest which protocols may perform best in large networks.