Mobile Ad Hoc Network in Disaster Area Network Scenario: A Review on Routing Protocols

Abstract

Disasters could cause communication systems partially or completely down. In such a case, relief operations need a rapidly deployed communication system to save lives. Exchanging information among the rescue team is a vital factor to make important decisions. Communication system required to be robust to failures, rapidly deployable, easily maintainable to provide better services. Wireless ad-hoc networks could be the choice of establishing communication with the aid of existing infrastructure in a post-disaster case. In order to optimize mobile ad-hoc network performance, address the challenges that could lead to unreliable performance is required. One and most crucial key challenge is routing information from a sender to receiver. Due to the characteristics of a disaster environment such as signal attenuation, communication links exist between rescue crew is short-lived, suffer from frequent route breakage, and may result in unreliable end-to-end services. Many routing protocols have been proposed and evaluated in different network environments. This paper presents the basic taxonomy of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks and the state of the art in routing categorizes (Proactive, Reactive, Geographic-aware and Delay tolerant Networks (DTN)). The comparison of existing routing protocols in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks indicates that overhead in Proactive and Geographic is competitive with delay in Reactive and DTN routing.