COMPARATIVE STUDY AND PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT OF REACTIVE ROUTING PROTOCOLS FOR MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS

This research presented a comparative study of reactive routing protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, with particular emphasis on AODV, DSR, and AOMDV. MANETs present unique routing challenges because of dynamic topology, wireless link instability, limited resources, and unpredictable node mobility. AODV provides an efficient and relatively straightforward on-demand routing mechanism, whereas DSR benefits from source routing and route caching. AOMDV introduces multipath capability and can provide improved route resilience under dynamic network conditions. The comparative analysis indicates that protocol performance is strongly dependent on mobility, network density, traffic load, and topology changes. Consequently, no individual reactive protocol can be considered universally optimal. To address these limitations, an Adaptive Route Stability and Link Quality Framework (ARSLQF) was proposed. The framework considers link quality, mobility, residual energy, congestion, packet loss, and route reliability when selecting routes. Predictive route monitoring and alternate-route activation can potentially improve packet delivery, throughput, delay, and route recovery. For a publishable experimental study, the next stage should be to implement AODV, DSR, AOMDV, and the proposed enhanced protocol in NS-3 or OMNeT++, run controlled simulations at different node densities and mobility levels, and statistically validate the resulting performance differences

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