A Mobile Ad Hoc Network Routing Protocols: A Comparative Study

Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANET), are complex and distributed networks that are dynamic. Which are infrastructure less and multi-hop in nature. The communication of a node can be either direct or through intermediate nodes without a fixed and dedicated infrastructure. Hence it is necessary to design an efficient routing protocol for ad hoc network which can address the issues of MANET efficiently. In ad hoc, routing algorithms are classified into nine categories namely: sourceinitiated (reactive), table-driven (proactive), hybrid, hierarchical, multipath, multicast, location-aware, geographical-multicast and power-aware. This paper presents a survey and to review a comparative study about various routing protocols under each of these categories. Additionally, brief discussions about major routing issues are addressed. This survey paper focuses on the taxonomy related to ad hoc routing techniques and compares the features of routing protocols.