Review of Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs)

For some decades now, network routing have been one of the most researched area in computing networking. A lot of researches have been done on wired and wireless networks. Recent technological changes have created more research areas for network routing technology. Ad hoc networks like wireless sensor networks (WSN), vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) wireless mesh network (WMN) and Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) have seen research increase in recent times. Due to the mobile nature of a lot of gadgets we use this days, the researchers embarked on a review to comprehensively show the various routing protocol technology that one can adopts when implementing a network routing scheme for MANETs. Reviews on types, classifications, routing techniques, geographical coverage, route metric, route repository and route reconfiguration strategies. This paper presented a comparative study of the various routing protocols highlighted. Areas of strength of each protocols were shown. Network Simulators that have implemented these protocols by default were also presented in this paper.