| Routing class | Reactive [46] | Geographical | Proactive [46] |
| Routing structure | Mostly flat, except cluster-based routing | Greedy forwarding routing | Both Flat and hierarchical structures |
| Availability of route | Determined when needed | Always available | Always available |
| Control Traffic volume | Lower than proactive routing protocols | Generate less control traffic | Usually high |
| Periodic updates | Not required. Some nodes may require periodic beacons. | Periodic beacons | Yes, some may use conditional. |
| Route acquisition delay | High | Low | Low |
| Storage Requirements | Depends on the number of routes kept or required. Usually lower than proactive protocols | The storage will be high since each node stores the locations | High |
| Bandwidth requirement | Low | High | High |
| Power requirement | Low | Low | High |
| Scalability | Source routing protocols up to few hundred nodes. Point-to-point may scale higher. | Limited Scalability problem | Usually up to 100 nodes. |
| Handling effects of mobility | Usually updates Associativity-Based Routing introduced localised broadcast query. AODV uses local route discovery | Constantly changing | Occur at fixed intervals and alters periodic updates based on mobility |
| Quality of service support | Few can support QoS , Although most support shortest path | Provide a node location service | Mainly shortest path as the QoS metric |
| Weaknesses | Have high latency, Flooding can lead to network clogging. | Short life of nodes in the networks due to the frequency of communication in each node. | Unsuitable for reconfigurable wireless ad-hoc network environment and not suitable for large networks. |
| Strengths | Reduce the overheads because it does not need to maintain up-to-date information about the network. | Suitable for sensor networks. The mobility support can be facilitated. | Control traffic are constant, and routes are always available. |