PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT OF ENERGY AWARE AND ADAPTIVE ROUTING PROTOCOLS FOR MANETS – A SURVEY

Mobile Ad hoc Networks are infrastructure-less networks where each node acts as sender, receiver as well as router for exchange of data. These nodes are usually battery-powered and often they die out before data transmission is complete. These networks are highly dynamic due to node mobility leading to frequent link breaks. This gives rise to added route repairs which increase routing overhead and use up battery resource of nodes unnecessarily. As a result, lifetime of the network is considerably reduced. Hence, the main target of routing protocols is to create an energy aware and adaptive network in order to prolong its lifetime. Interference from other mobile hosts is also a major limitation that degrades protocol performance. When protocol enhancements are proposed, reactive routing protocols such as AODV and DSR are given prime importance because of their on-demand characteristics. Therefore, the highlight is on reducing interference and energy consumption which could ensure availability of discovered path for the complete duration of information transfer. It is observed from research studies that incorporating a cross layer approach can further improve performance metrics such as throughput, end-to-end delay and control overhead of the network. This paper emphasizes on the study of different energy aware and adaptive modifications of routing protocols and the proposed solutions to achieve performance gain in MANET