Routing Algorithms for MANET-IoT Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

With the powerful evolution of wireless communication systems in recent years, mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are more and more applied in many fields such as environment, energy efficiency, intelligent transport systems, smart agriculture, and IoT ecosystems, as well as expected to contribute role more and more important in the future Internet. However, due to the characteristic of the mobile ad hoc environment, the performance is dependent mainly on the deployed routing protocol and relative low. Therefore, routing protocols should be more flexible and intelligent to enhance network performance. This paper surveyed and analysed a series of recently proposed routing protocols for MANET-IoT networks. Results have shown that these protocols are classified into four main categories: performance improvement, quality of service (QoS-aware), energy-saving, and security-aware. Most protocols are evolved from these existing traditional protocols. Then, we compare the performance of the four traditional routing protocols under the different movement speeds of the network node aim determines the most stable routing protocol in smart cities environments. The experimental results showed that the proactive protocol work is good when the movement network nodes are low. However, the reactive protocols have more stable and high performance for high movement network scenarios. Thus, we confirm that the proposal of the routing protocols for MANET becomes more suitable based on improving the ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing protocol. This study is the premise for our further in-depth research on IoT ecosystems.