A Review of Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad-Hoc NETworks (MANET)

The increase in popularity of mobile wireless devices and easily available source has lead researchers to develop a wide variety of Mobile Ad-hoc NETworking (MANET) protocols to explore the unique communication opportunities presented by these devices. An Ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile hosts forming a temporary network without the aid of any centralized administration or infrastructure. Such networks have no fixed topology due to the high degree of node mobility. Devices are able to communicate directly using the wireless spectrum in a peer-to-peer fashion, and route messages through intermediate nodes, however the nature of wireless shared communication and mobile devices result in many routing and security challenges which must be addressed before deploying a MANET. In this paper we investigate the range of MANET routing protocols available and discuss the functionalities of several ranging from early protocols such as DSDV to more advanced such as MAODV, our protocol study focuses upon works by Perkins in developing and improving MANET routing The literature review identified a number of trends within research papers such as exclusive use of the random waypoint mobility model, excluding key metrics from simulation results and not comparing protocol performance against available alternatives.