A Survey on Reactive Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET)

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is collection of multi-hop wireless mobile nodes that communicate with each other without centralized control or established infrastructure. The wireless links in this network are highly error prone and can go down frequently due to mobility of nodes, interference and less infrastructure. Therefore, routing in MANET is a critical task due to highly dynamic environment. In recent years, several routing protocols have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks such as proactive routing protocols, reactive routing protocols etc. This survey paper provides an overview of reactive routing protocols by presenting their characteristics, functionality, benefits and limitations and then makes their comparative analysis so to analyze their performance. The objective is to make observations about how the performance of these protocols can be improved.