A Review of Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad-Hoc NETworks (MANET)

Abstract

Abstract-The increase in availability and popularity of mobile wireless devices has lead researchers to develop a wide variety of Mobile Ad-hoc NETworking (MANET) protocols to exploit the unique communication opportunities presented by these devices. Devices are able to communicate directly using the wireless spectrum in a peer-to-peer fashion, and route messages through intermediate nodes, however the nature of wireless shared communication and mobile devices result in many routing and security challenges which must be addressed before deploying a MANET. In this paper we investigate the range of MANET routing protocols available and discuss the functionalities of several ranging from early protocols such as DSDV to more advanced such as MAODV, our protocol study focuses upon works by Perkins in developing and improving MANET routing. A range of literature relating to the field of MANET routing was identified and reviewed, we also reviewed literature on the topic of securing AODV based MANETs as this may be the most popular MANET protocol. The literature review identified a number of trends within research papers such as exclusive use of the random waypoint mobility model, excluding key metrics from simulation results and not comparing protocol performance against available alternatives.Index Terms-AODV, MANET, routing protocols. I. INTRODUCTIONWireless technologies such as Bluetooth or the 802.11 standards enable mobile devices to establish a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) by connecting dynamically through the wireless medium without any centralised structure [1]. MANETs offer several advantages over traditional networks including reduced infrastructure costs, ease of establishment and fault tolerance, as routing is performed individually by nodes using other intermediate network nodes to forward packets [2], this multi-hopping reduces the chance of bottlenecks, however the key MANET attraction is greater mobility compared with wired solutions.There are a number of issues which affect the reliability of Ad-hoc networks and limit their viability for different scenarios; lack of centralised structure within MANET requires that each individual node must act as a router and is responsible for performing packet routing tasks; this is done using one or more common routing protocols across the MANET [3]. Performing routing tasks requires memory and computation power, however mobile devices feature physical size and weight limitations essential for their mobility, this Manuscript received September 6, 2012; revised December 12, 2012. This work was supported by the University of DerbyThe authors are with the University of Derby, Derbyshire, DE22 1GB, UK (e-mail: A.Hinds1@unimail.derby.ac.uk, eppiemike@aol.com, s.y.zhu@derby.ac.uk, h.al-aqrabi@derby.ac.uk ).reduces the available memory and computational resources as well as limiting battery power.MANETs containing more nodes require greater processing power, memory and bandwidth to maintain accurate routing information; this introduces traffic overhead into the network a...

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“…The routing is initially established using the proactive approach, and then the route requests from additionally added nodes are provided using the reactive approach. This approach tends to reduce the overhead of the proactive protocols as well as the time delay of the reactive protocols [4]. An example to such protocol is the Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) [15,26].…”

“…However, this type of protocols does not perform effectively in highly dynamic networks as for each topology change; the MNs are obliged to update their routing tables causing an increase in the control message overheads thus leading to an overall network performance degradation [4]. Examples of this protocol are Destination sequence Distance Vector (DSDV) [14,20,21], Wireless Routing Protocol (WRP) [22,14] and Clusterhead Gateway Switch Routing [14,18,23].…”

“…The route discovery process takes place only when a node "demands" the route to a certain destination. When a node wants to send a packet to a certain destination, it applies the route discovery mechanism which mainly depends on the idea of flooding the network with route query requests to this destination [4]. The determined route remains valid until the destination is reached or any link breakage occurs in it.…”

“…The most common classification is based upon how routing information is acquired and maintained by the nodes of the network. Accordingly, the Ad-hoc routing protocols can be divided into three types: Proactive, Reactive, and Hybrid routing protocols [4,2,15,16,19].…”

“…In addition to that, the topology of the network faces rapid and frequent changes due to the mobility of the nodes, or sometimes their failures. These MNs of the MANET are self-organized and selfconfigured devices, and are able to communicate together despite this absence of an underlying structure or a centralized administrative support [3,4].…”