Routing is the process of transferring data packets from one terminal to another. Routing aims to find the optimal path according to some criterion. Shortest-path routing is a common scheme used for routing in data networks. It depends on assigning a length to each link in the network. A path made up of a series of links will have a path length equal to the sum of the lengths of the links in the route. Then, it chooses the path between source and destination that has the shortest route. The shortest-path route can be implemented using one of two well-known techniques, namely, the Bellman–Ford algorithm or the Dijkstra's algorithm [11].

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), data packet transmissions between source and destination nodes are done through relaying the data packets by intermediate nodes. Hence, the source needs to locate the destination and set up a path to reach it. There are two types of routing algorithms in MANETs, namely, table-based and on-demand algorithms. In table-based routing algorithms, each node in the network stores a routing table, which indicates the geographic locations of each node in the network. These routing tables are updated periodically, through a special HELLO message sent by every node. Table-based routing protocols for MANETs include the destination sequence distance vector routing protocol (DSDV), wireless routing protocol (WRP), and cluster-head gateway switch routing (CGSR). The periodical updating of the routing tables makes table-based routing algorithms inefficient.