A study of routing protocols for MANETs

Abstract

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is an autonomous set of mobile nodes, which can continue communication while moving from one place to another, without any fixed and permanent infrastructure. Every mobile node acts as a communicating node as well as forwarding node. Every node has to perform routing. Routing in wireless networks and specially in mobile networks is a tough challenge due to dynamic topologies and network partitioning problems. This paper explains routing in MANETs. This paper also surveys the unicast routing schemes to send a packet from a single source to a single destination. A conceptual comparison is given at the end of the paper to compare routing protocols.