Comparative review study of reactive and proactive routing protocols in MANETs

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are generating a lot of interests due to 3G and 4G activities. The dynamic nature of these networks demands new set of network routing strategy protocols to be implemented in order to provide efficient end-to-end communication. Due to the diverse applications that use MANETs, such as battlefield, emergency services, and disaster discovery, MANETs offer many advantages to many organizations that need wireless roaming. For efficient and timely use, routing and synchronization are essential. Both are hot research topics in MANETs. This paper concentrates on routing, which is a challenging task and has seen a huge number of different strategies proposed, each claiming to provide an improvement over other strategies. These competing strategies make it quite difficult to determine which one may perform optimally under a number of different sets of network conditions as defined by their Quality of Service (QoS) offerings. This paper reviews some of the state-of-the-art and widely investigated MANET routing strategies in the literature. Moreover, a performance comparison of discussed routing protocol strategies is provided and suggestions are made to achieve improvement in performance of these protocols. This research is followed by presenting further research that will be pursued to define a radically most optimum set of strategies to satisfy different types of application domains.