This thesis concerns routing protocols for MANETs with a particular focus on location-based ones. After a deep overview of the literature, one regular routing protocol, DYMO, and two location-based (LB) ones, DYMOselfwd and AODV-Line, have been selected for further study. To this end, they have been implemented and simulated with the OMNET++ simulator. The scenarios are chosen to evaluate the impact of the node density, the nodes' mobility behaviour and of the ping payload on the performance of the routing protocols, in terms of scalability and ability to recover from route disruptions in a mobile scenario. In addition, the impact of an error in the location information is also analysed in the case of the two LB protocols.