Abstract
Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes that form a dynamic topology and highly resource constrained network which are the most important characteristics of a MANET come from node mobility and Infrastructureless nature of MANETs. These characteristics essentially lead to adopt a routing protocol that quickly adapts to nodes mobility. Routing protocols in MANETs are classified into three types: proactive (table-driven), reactive (on-demand) and hybrid protocols. A routing protocol also may be considered a single path protocol or multipath protocol based on the routing mechanism. A routing protocol should try to minimize routing overhead such as control traffic and delay time overhead, maximize data packet delivery and throughput. This paper provides a comparative study for the performance of reactive against proactive routing protocols in MANETs. A comparison study has been introduced between proactive-reactive, single path-multipath protocols, and between reactive protocols only in terms of packet delivery fraction, average end-to-end delay, routing overhead and throughput. This evaluation and comparison study have been performed by means of simulation using NS2.