A Study of Congestion Aware Adaptive Routing Protocols in MANET

Routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have been explored extensively in last few years. Much of this work is targeted at finding a feasible route from a source to a destination without considering current network traffic or application requirements. Routing may let a congestion happen which is detected by congestion control, but dealing with congestion in reactive manner results in longer delay, and unnecessary packet loss and requires significant overhead if a new route is needed. Routing should not be aware of, but also be adaptive to, network congestion. Adaptation to the congestion helps to increase both the effectiveness and efficiency of routing. These problems are solved by the congestion-aware routing protocols in certain degree. These protocols which are adaptive to congestion status of mobile ad-hoc network can greatly improve the network performance. In this paper, we present the survey of congestion adaptive routing protocols for mobile ad-hoc network. Finally, the future direction of congestion-aware routing protocols is described. Keywords: Ad hoc networks, congestion aware routing, Congestion metric, congestion adaptabilit