Position Based and Hybrid Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: A Survey

Routing protocols for mobile ad-hoc networks can be broadly classified as position-based (geographic) and topology-based. Geographic routing uses location information of nodes to route messages. Geographic routing protocols use greedy forwarding under which a node forwards a packet to a next node which is closer to the destination than itself; when greedy routing fails due to the non-existence of nodes closer to the destination than itself, different protocols use different strategies to forward packets. In this paper, we present a critical survey of the geographic and hybrid routing protocols presented in the literature recently. The main aim of the paper is to provide a timely survey of the recently proposed protocols, complementary to the existing surveys on geographic routing protocols.