Survey of On Demand Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Network

ABSRTACT Ad hoc network are wireless network with no infrastructure support. Due to the limited transmission range of wireless network interfaces, multiple network hops may be needed for one node to exchange data with another across the network. In such a network, each mobile node operates not only as a host but also as a router, forwarding packets for other mobile nodes in the network that may not be within the direct reach. Routing protocols developed for wired networks such as the wired Internet are inadequate here as they not only assume mostly fixed topology but also have high overheads. This has lead to several routing algorithms/proposals specifically targeted for ad hoc networks. While some of these proposals are optimized variants of protocols originally designed for wired networks, the rest adopt new paradigms such as proactive or on demand routing. This paper concentrates on various on Demands (or also known as reactive) Routing protocols such as DSR and AODV, their optimization and their comparison with Proactive Routing Protocols.