Study of Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are rapidly evolving as an important area of mobility. MANETs are infrastructure less autonomous collection of mobile users that communicate over relatively bandwidth constrained wireless links. Due to mobile nature of nodes, the network topology may change rapidly and unpredictably time to time. The network is decentralized, where all network activity including discovering the topology and delivering messages must be executed by the nodes themselves, i.e., routing functionality will be incorporated into mobile nodes. Many routing algorithms have been proposed and developed for accomplishing this task. Therefore, it is difficult to determine which protocol performs best under different situations. Hence, this paper presents review of routing protocols.