2013 IEEE Student Conference on Research and Development (SCOReD), 16 -17 December 2013, Putrajaya, Malaysia
Review on MANET Routing Protocols and
Challenges
Shabana Habib Somaila Saleem
Department of Electrical, Electronics Department of computer Science,
and Systems Engineering Govt. College for Women
National University Peshawar KPK,
of Malaysia. Pakistan.
shabana@eng.ukm.my samaila_s@yahoo.com
Abstract—A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is composed
of Mobile Nodes (MNs) without any fix infrastructure. Currently,
It is one of the most attractive research topics in the wireless
communication. These MNs dynamically create temporary
network and transferring messages from one MN to others in
peer to peer fashion. A routing protocol runs on every mobile
host and therefore subjected to the limitation of resources on
every node. Therefore, to guarantee communication an efficient
routing technique is desirable to that allow nodes to communicate
in a timely manner. This routing technique must be able to
minimize the computation overload on mobile host as well as
overhead of traffic on network. This paper, review the MANET
and recent routing protocols for efficient communication
Keywords— MANET; Proactive protocols; Reative protocols;
Manet charecteristics
I. INTRODUCTION
Currently, MANET is a new paradigm of wireless
communication for mobile host. A mobile ad hoc network can
be developed by connecting different mobile nodes through a
wireless link with no supporting fixed infrastructure. Adhoc
network is a suitable choice for a situation in which there is no
alternatives are available to create a network, this feature
makes it challenging to create a network without any existing
infrastructure. Typical challenges of mobile ad-hoc networks
include security, hidden terminal, bandwidth constraints, low
power devices and routing [1].
Under the real-time MANET environment, the nodes
involved in communications are highly mobile and the
network topology changes very frequently. Due to high
mobility and dynamic nature of nodes in MANETs may cause
adverse effects on the performance of message sending and
receiving. So the mobile nodes have to perform the
responsibilities to behave like routers and run routing protocol
on every node to established links by participating and
maintenance of routes with other nodes in the network.
The main requirement of routing protocols is to achieve
minimal communication time with minimum consumption of
network resources. Many routing protocols have been
proposed for MANETs, according to [2] but only three of
them are properly implemented. In this study, the most recent
978-1-4799-2656-5/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE 529
Khawaja Muhammad Saqib
Department of computer Science,
Govt. College Peshawar, Higher
Education Department, KPK,
Pakistan
saqib.sam@gmail.com
research progress of MANET routing protocols is reviewed
and current MANET Challenges are identified.
II. MOBILE AD HOC NETWORK ROUTING
PROTOCOLS
Although a variety of protocols have been proposed and
implemented for the MANET. This section describes some of
the widely used protocols along with their Merits and
Demerits. Ad hoc routing protocols can be organized into Flat
routing, Hierarchical routing and Geographic position assisted
routing.
A. Flat Routing Architecture
In this approach all the nodes are identical in terms of
responsibility, and there is no concept of special gateways.
The advantages of this approach are increased reliability or
survivability due to no single point of failure and alternative
routes in the network, Optimal Routing, reduced use of
wireless resources and better load balancing property [3]. In
ad hoc routing literature there are three possible routing
protocols, proactive, reactive, and Hybrid .These protocols
maintain a table to discover the route before the sender starts
transmitting data. The protocol is further divided into
Reactive, Proactive and hybrid protocols as shown in table 1.
1) Proactive Routing Protocol: The proactive protocol is
also known as table driven routing protocol. These protocols
are mostly based on shortest path algorithms. The proactive
protocols do not have initial route discovery delay but
consumes lot of bandwidth for periodic updates of topology.
There are several routing protocols that fall under this
category [4].
a) Dynamic Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector
Routing Protocol (DSDV): The DSDV protocol is a table
driven algorithm. Each node maintain routing table which
carries information about all possible destinations, number of
hops for each destination and a unique sequence number that
is assigned by the destination. This sequence number is used
to distinguish new routes from stale ones and also avoid the
loops formation. In order to make a consistent view of the
network each node transmits and updates its routing table
periodically. The data being broadcast by each station consist
of the destination address, the number of hops required to
reach the destination and the new sequence number, originally
stamped by the destination. Transmission of routing updates
caused network traffic overhead, which can be controlled by
employing the updates in two ways. The first one is full dump,
in which all the available routing information is send to the
neighbouring nodes. The second type is incremental update
which contains all that routing information which has been
changed since the last full dump .
DSDV is a routing protocol that belongs to the class of the
table driven protocols so every node in the DSDV broadcast
the route updates periodically. Since the nodes in the network
are mobile therefore, the broadcasting of the updates is more
frequents, thus generating more traffic in the network. In
DSDV, each node broadcast the route updates periodically so
that every node in the network receive this route update and
have a consistent view of the network. In DSDV each node
must know how to reach to other node in the network. Every
node that receive the updates match the update with its table
and if found some changes it update its table entries and
forward the update to the other nodes in the network[5].
A sequence number is generated for every node broadcast
and this broadcast not only contained the data but also some
other useful information .i.e. Destination ID, hope count to the
destination and destination sequence number. The receiver
node also broadcast a route received message and add an
increment to its metric. For the rout selection process when a
mobile node receive a new broadcast then it find out about the
new fresh route by comparing the information contained in the
arrived message with its own stored information. It manages
the comparison using the sequence numbers. If the sequence
number is greater than it replace the entry in the routing table
The information with the most updated sequence number will
be selected but if the sequence numbers are same then the
route with better metric will be selected. Information that is
broadcast contains address of the destination node, total no of
hops to the destination, and received information sequence
number regarding the destination.
One of the main advantages of DSDV is that it maintains
“loop-free fewest hop path” for all the destination nodes.
DSDV protocol is effective for small ad hoc networks but it is
not suitable for large network because the overhead of control
messages increases by the order O (N^2) where ‘N’ represent
the total number of mobile nodes in the MANET . Thus by
increasing the nodes the size of the routing table increases
which consumes a large bandwidth when being transmitted
over a network. Another factor that create network overhead
in DSDV is the propagation of periodic updates for routing
tables because DSDV maintains a consistent view of the
network. Also it provide single path for routing and does not
support multicasting.
b) Wireless Routing Protocol (WRP): S The WRP
protocol is a proactive routing protocol. It broadcast the
update only when changes occur in the network topology, also
instead of broadcasting the whole table, it broadcast the
changes in the table. In WRP, the source node doesn’t need to
530
make a special request for a route like in reactive routing
protocols as all the routes are maintained all the time [6].
Allnodes in a network maintain information in the form of
tables for each destination.Distance table, contains entries
about the destination, next hope, distance and the predecessor
of each destination .for routing the Routing table contains all
the activities as in the distance table with the addition of the
marker entry. The marker entry serves as a tag to identify
whether the link is single path, loop or invalid. For link
information Link cost table contains cost of the link to every
node and for information transmission Message retransmission
list contains information about the neighbour who has not
acknowledge its update message and retransmit the update
again
WRP belongs to path finding algorithms and the main
problem in these algorithms are that they create temporary
routing loops at the time of verifying there predecessor
information. But WRP give advantage over these path finding
algorithms by not creating temporary routing loops, when
verifying predecessor information . But on the other hand it
maintain four tables for routing information that’s why it has a
higher memory requirement than any other in table-driven
routing protocols also it uses Hello messages which consume
bandwidth and energy .
2) Reactive protocol: The Reactive protocols also called
as on-demand routing protocols. These protocols employ a
lazy approach whereby mobile vehicles only discover routes
to destinations on-demand. The routing table is periodically
updated, when some data is there to send. Thus these protocols
maintain only the routes that are currently in use, as a result it
is reducing the burden on the network when only a few of all
vacant routes is in use at any time. For initial route discovery
this protocol use flooding process, which causes routing
overhead, delay and make it unsuitable for safety applications
in vehicular adhoc network. Another disadvantage is that,
although route maintenance is limited to the routes currently in
use, it may still generate a significant amount of network
traffic when the network topology changes frequently. Finally,
packets transmitted to the destination are likely to be lost if the
route to the destination changes [7].
a) Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing
(AODV): AODV is the modified version of C. Perkins DSDV
routing protocol. Instead of having a constant view of the
network and propagate routing information periodically, it
works in an on-demand fashion . An important characteristics
is that it support both unicast and multicast communication. It
is specifically developed for the MANETand come up with
loop freedom and provides quick convergence.it has
scalability propertyas well as can easily be fitted into the
existing routing protocol stack. In AODV in order to transmit
the source must process the route information from source to
destination, but if that information is not present a route
discovery cycle used for route discovery.
The characteristics of the route discovery cycle is as
follow; in order to find a route to particular destination the
source send broadcast PERQ to immediate neighbors. The
PERP contain Source Identifier, Source Sequence Number, the
Destination Identifier, the destination Sequence Number,
Broad cast ID and time to Live Field.. If the immediate
neighbor has the destination route, it replies the broadcast
otherwise it itself initiate the broadcast to its immediate
neighbor. This process continues and each intermediate node
compares the destination sequence number with the
destination sequence number received in PERQ to establish
valid route and this process continues until the broadcast is
received to the original destination or to the node which have
the route to the destination. Once the trace of the route is
established the whole chain of PERP is sent back, and the
original source has route to the destination [8].
Routes in AODV are maintained if a source node move
away by some reason then it has to reinitiate the routing
discover mechanism to reallocate the destination node and if a
node move along with a route then the entire neighbouring
node must propagate the link failure notification message to
each of its neighbour so that each node in the network update
their routing table for that link . The amount of information
maintained at each node is limited, where all nodes must be
aware of their neighbouring nodes either broadcasting hello
messages periodically.Nodes have routes to destination and
maintain next hop.the nodes maintain “predecessor list” that
contain information about all the nodes using the current node
as a relay for information exchange. The information entry in
the routing table has a life time.
AODV is on-demand distributed approach, in which nodes
maintain information about only those routes that are needed.
Thus reducing the size of routing table and also minimize the
bandwidth overhead .It always replies to the first arriving
PREQ message using the destination numbers, which implies
that AODV favors the least congested route rather than
shortest route . AODV is scalable for large networks and
support loop-free routing but the periodic propagation of
“Hello message” creates routing overhead.
b) Dynamic Source Routing (DSR): The Dynamic
Source Routing protocol is on demand routing protocol and
create a route when source node demands it. This protocol
uses source routing in which each packet carries the complete
routing information for its destination in its header.The
protocol is composed of Routing discovery and Routing
maintenance mechanisms;
During the route discovery mechanism the DSR
accumulate the address of each device coming between the
source and the destination. The process of route discovery is
work as follow.If a source has route of the destination in its
cache it utilize that route otherwise a route discovery protocol
starts. The source node sends a Route Request packet by
flooding the network. If the node receive the Route request is
intended destination it returns Route reply to the source. The
Route reply contains the list of best path form the source to
destination. When the source receives this route reply packet it
updates its route cache for sending further data. However if
the node that receive the Route request is not a intended
receiver it again forward the route request to its neighbor
531
except the source also adding its address in the Route Request
packet.
DSR requires that each node that receives the message
must acknowledge it to the initiator, thus confirming the
validity of the node. If no reply is received form the next hop
the packet is resent until certain number of times, but if the
result is negative the Route Error packet is sent to the initiator
so it can remove that source route from its cache. One of the
main advantages of DSR is that it avoids the periodic
propagation of update information due to which it save
bandwidth and reduce power consumption [9].
TABLE I ROUTING PHILOSOPHY COMPARISON
Advantages Drawbacks
Proactive
Delay of route determination Communication overhead
increases increases
Storage requirement increases
Network Properties
Number of communication increases Rate of topology change increases
Number of nodes in the network
increases
Reactive
Communication overhead decrease Not Optimal bandwidth
but it is subject to number of utilization
communication in the network Delay of route determination
increase
Network Properties
Rate of topology changes increase Number of communication
increase
Number of node in the network
increase
Hybrid
Better trade-off between communication overhead and delay
Additionally, DSR maintain multiple routes to a
destination in its cache. If by some reason a route is broken to
some destination then it check its cache for another valid route
to the same destination and does not re invoke the route
reconstruction process. That’s how the route recovery process
is faster in DSR than any other on demand routing protocol.
The comparison is shown in table II. However if it does not
have an alternative route to the destination then it must
reinitiate the route discover process. Placing the entire route
information in both reply packet and data packet create extra
bandwidth and processing overhead .DSR is not scalable to
large networks because it assumes that the diameter of the
network is not more than 10 hops. Route discovery and route
maintenances create extra bandwidth overhead.
B. Location-Aid/ Geographic position assisted routing
With the aid of location information of MNs, several
protocols have been proposed as the variants of the reactive
routing protocols. Unlike the non-location-aid protocols which
may force all the nodes be involved in the messages
forwarding, MNs use locally stored location table which
contains location information of other nodes to direct the
message to the destination. In that case, only those MNs in a
specific area which normally locates in the same direction
with the destination) can forward the messages. Thus, the solution to all these problems by combining all the best
overall overhead caused by the routing algorithm can be properties of reactive and routing protocol. ZRP uses the
reduced to some extent, the energy of MNs outside the concept of zones and the radius of a zone can be define in term
forwarding area can be saved, and the traffic load due to the of radio hop. In ZRP, “a routing zone comprises a few
message flooding can be lessened. The popular protocols
mobile ad hoc nodes within one, two, or more hops away from
using location information include the Location-Aid Routing
protocol (LAR), Distance Routing Effect Algorithm for where the central node is formed.” If the source and
Mobility (DREAM). destination nodes are in the same node then table driven
approach is use for route mechanism but if they are present in
Location-Aided Routing (LAR): LAR is on demand different zones then on-demand approach is use for routing.
protocol which is based on DSR. LAR architecture utilizes The ZRP has three sub-protocols, Intrazone routing protocol
location information to improve the MANET performance by (IARP), Reactive Interzone routing protocol (IERP) and
reducing the routing overhead. It uses Global positioning Bordercast resolution protocol (BRP) [12].
system due to which nodes are capable of knowing there IARP is a tale-driven approach and can be implemented
location [10].In LAR, signaling traffic overhead is reduced by using techniques like link-state or distance-vector routing. The
limiting the searching zone for a new route into a smaller main objective of IARP is having the most up to date
request zone. The two major concepts areExpecting zone and information about all the neighbouring nodes within the zone
Requesting zonein LAR protocol. It assumes that the source .The IERP is an on-demand approach to discover the route
node has the advance knowledge of the destination physical information outside the local routing zone. Bordercast is a
location and velocity, and then expected zone is defined using mechanism which forwards the route request information to
the location and velocity information. However the requesting the border nodes of the zone, which first checks if the target
zone is a small rectangle that contains the sender node location node is present in its zone or continues the process of
and the expected zone. In LAR, to send information from a bordercast. Bordercast must not forward the request message
source to destination, the source node explicitly specifies the to the zone already covered. If Zone routing protocol uses
request zone in its routing request message. Those nodes IERP to find the destination then it does not give an overall
which receive the route request message but don’t fall in that optimized shortest path, this is one of the main limitations of
zone, discard the route request message. ZRP. Also increase in network size cause unpredictable large
The GPS is used for position tracking and navigation, it’s overhead.
not necessary that every mobile device will be equipped with
GPS. So limits LAR in various situations. The Positional TABLE II. COMPARISON OF ON-DEMAND ROUTING PROTOCOLS
errors can create problem in routing. Communication Parameters AODV DSR
performance will be suffer, if data send is based on location Routing Metric Freshest and shortest path Shortest Path
information alone and do not consider factors like signal Frequency of Update Event Driven RM Event Driven RM
strength, power life and connectivity information.
Loop free Yes Yes
C. Hierarchical Routing Protocols
Use sequence number Yes No
The infrastructure-free characteristics ground every mobile Multi-path ability No Yes
node in MANET to act as a normal information source and
Structure Flat Flat
destination or router. In this mode, each node will play a very
similar role in the routing, forwarding, etc. With the number of Method Unicast Unicast
mobile nodes increase, the topology is getting extremely Update Destination Source Source
Multicasting Yes No
complicated. More self-organizing messages needed to be
exchanged in the network so that the traffic load will be a big Route maintained in Routing table Route Cache
issue which will deteriorate the overall performance and
efficiency. Some interesting ideas have been proposed to solve III. MANET CHALLENGES
this problem, using so called Clustering and Hierarchically The mobile ad hoc network brings a lot of great
Structuring. The entire network is clustered into a number of opportunities to technology but it also come up with different
Zones. A cluster-head is chosen inside each zone. Therefore, challenges [1],[13].
most of the detailed information can be only exchanged within
the cluster and the cluster-head is responsible for the x Routing: The mechanism of routing in ad hoc network
aggregated information exchanged amongst the zones. In this between any pair of nodes for information exchange is
mode, the cluster-head mobile node will have to perform a difficult because the mobile nodes in ad hoc randomly
much heavier self-organizing job, such as route recovery, move and leave or join the network . Thus the network
messages forwarding than others [11]. topology continually changing and make the routing
mechanism in Ad hoc challenging.
Zone routing protocol (ZRP): In order to maintain routing
information, proactive protocols utilize excessive network x Quality of Service: In a network, quality of a service
bandwidth, while reactive routing creates delays due to long is determined by the guaranteed data transfer in a
route request.The zone routing protocol was introduced as given period of time. The mobile nodes in MANET

532
 are the low battery devices and act as both router and
host at the same time. Being a host it act as source and
destination. However as a router it acts as an
intermediate bridge for the exchange of information
between network nodes. The Quality of Service also
dependent upon the volume of the network. If the
volume is large then it’s difficult to transmit
information from the source to remote destination,
because the overhead in transmitting information
through a large number of intermediate devices
disturb the quality of service of the network.
Furthermore, the constant change in network topology
and limitation of network resources makes the quality
of service in MANET a challenging task.
x Power Consumption: In MANET the nodes are mobile
and works on batteries, therefore in order to maintain
the network power consumption in MANETs, is the
big problem of the day. The limited battery capacities
of these mobile hosts in wireless ad hoc network
create attention toward the significance of power
awareness in MANET design . Due to the complicated
nature of MANET, all the participating nodes must of
small and light weighted and designing of power
efficient systems is a challenging factor in MANET .
x Multicasting: Multicasting is an important factor and
need to be address efficiently in mobile ad hoc
networks. Multicasting refers to the transmission of
the message to a multiple receivers having same
address. It is suitable for the environment where the
single message needs to be delivered to the group. E.g.
battalion, scientists, rescues teams, etc. The
multicasting reduces the communication cost by
sending single information to a group of recipients
instead of sending through multiple uncast.
Multicasting minimizes the link bandwidth
consumption, sender and router processing, and
delivery delay.
x Security: In a network security is the major issue that
has to be addressed. Although many mechanism have
been developed for wired networks that guaranteed
secure delivery of datagram but since the MANET is a
new field and a lot of work is focusing on the routing
in MANET, hence, field of security for MANET has
been leave unexplored. Application of MANET such
as peer to peer application, sensor networks and
applications of ubiquitous computing are demanding
for strong protection and security mechanisms[14].
IV. CONCLUSION
MANET is a self organizing, self discovering and self
constructing network of mobile nodes created by wireless
links. Due to its dynamic topology and complex nature
defining routing mechanism for MANET is a challenging task.
Since the node is not familiar with its topology, therefore idea
to use the existing protocols developed for infrastructure
networks with the MANET does not works. During this study
it has been observed that several routing techniques have been
proposed but each has its own limitation. The routing protocol
533
which came under the review in this study are either observe
table driven or on demand approach for routing. Each
approach has its own characteristics and is adoptable to
specific environment and the selection of these protocols
depends on the suitability for the MANET applications.
REFERENCES
[1] Chlamtac, Conti and Liu, “Mobile ad-hoc networking: imperatives and
challenges,” Elsevier Ad-hoc networking, USA, Texas, pp. 13-64, 2003.
[2] N. Zhou and A. Abouzeid, “Routing in ad hoc networks: a theoretical
framework with practical implications," in Proc. 24th Annual Joint Conf.
IEEE Computer Commun. Societies (INFOCOM), vol. 2, Miami, FL,
USA, pp. 1240-1251, Mar. 2005.
[3] P. Johansson, T. Larsson, N. Hedman, B. Mielczarek, and M.
Degermark, “Scenario-based performance analysis of routing protocols
for mobile ad-hoc networks,” in International Conference on Mobile
Computing and Networking (MobiCom'99), pp. 195-206, 1999.
[4] P. L. Yang, C. Tian, and Y. Yu, “Analysis on optimizing model for
proactive ad hoc routing protocol," in Proc. Military Commun. Conf.
(MILCOM), vol. 5, Atlantic City, NJ, USA, pp. 2960-2966, Oct. 2005.
[5] C. E. Perkins and P. Bhagwat, “Highly Dynamic Destination- Sequenced
Distance-Vector Routing (DSDV) for Mobile Computers,” Proc. ACM
SIGCOMM ’94, pp. 234-244, 1994.
[6] S. Murthy and J. J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, “An efficient routing protocol
for wireless networks,” Mobile Networks and Applications, vol. 2, pp.
183-197, 1996.
[7] C. S. Rammurty and B. S. Manoj, “Ad Hoc wireless networks
architectures and protocols”, Prentice Hall, 2004.
[8] C. E. Perkins, E. Royer, and S. R. Das, “Ad hoc On Demand Distance
Vector (AODV) Routing,” In 2nd IEEE WorkShop on Mobile
Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA'99), pp. 90-100,
February 1999.
[9] B. D. Johnson and D. A. Maltz, “Dynamic source routing in ad hoc
wireless networks,” In Mobile Computing, vol 5, pp. 153-181, 1996.
[10] D. S. J. De-Couto and R. Morris, “Location Proxies and Intermediate
node forwarding for Practical Geographic forwarding,” Tech. Rep.
MIT_LCS-TR-824, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, June 2001.
[11] J. Sucec and I. Marsic, “Clustering overhead for hierarchical routing in
mobile ad hoc networks”. In Proceedings of the Twenty-first Annual
Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies,
volume 3, pages 1698–1706, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, 2002. IEEE
Computer Society Press.
[12] Z. J. Haas and M. R. Pearlman, “The Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) for
Ad-Hoc Networks,” IETF MANET working group, Internet draft, June
1999.
[13] J. Blum, A. Eskandarian and L. Hoffman, "Challenges of Intervehicle
Ad Hoc Networks," IEEE Transaction on Intelligent Transportation
Systems, vol. 4, pp. 347-351. 2004.
[14] N. Milanovic, “Routing And Security In Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks,”
IEEE Computer Society, pp. 61-65, 2004.