Mobile Ad-Hoc Network Routing Protocols: A Comparative Study

Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) has an autonomous network and nodes are free to move independently in any direction to change the route. MANET is generating a lot of interest in research community due to the advancement of wireless technologies. Its usage in various applications such as emergency situations, disaster relief operations, intelligent transportation systems, smart homes, patient monitory etc. offer several benefits to a number of organizations. These applications further demand a reliable and efficient communication. Hence, selecting an optimal path between nodes becomes vitally important. Majority of the researchers have worked in this discipline. This paper focuses on two major MANET routing protocols namely Proactive and Reactive to find their limitations. In addition, recent protocols are compared with respect to several parameters such as throughput, end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio etc. The Reactive protocols are found to be more effective when compared with Proactive. It is recommended to use more parameters for the evaluation of these protocols in future