Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) represent complex distributed systems that comprise wireless mobile nodes that can freely and dynamically self-organize into arbitrary and temporary, "ad-hoc" network topologies, allowing people and devices to seamlessly internetwork in areas with no pre-existing communication infrastructure, e.g., disaster recovery environments. Ad hoc networking concept is not a new one, having been around in various forms for over 20 years. Traditionally, tactical networks have been the only communication networking application that followed the ad hoc paradigm. Recently, the introduction of new technologies such as the Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11 and Hyperlan are helping enable eventual commercial MANET deployments outside the military domain. These recent evolutions have been generating a renewed and growing interest in the research and development of MANET. This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of this dynamic field. It first explains the important role that mobile ad hoc networks play in the evolution of future wireless technologies. Then, it reviews the latest research activities in these areas, including a summary of MANET's characteristics, capabilities, applications, and design constraints. The paper concludes by presenting a set of challenges and problems requiring further research in the future.

Abstract. Wireless networking has witnessed an explosion of interest from consumers in recent years for its applications in mobile and personal communications. As wireless networks become an integral component of the modern communication infrastructure, energy efficiency will be an important design consideration due to the limited battery life of mobile terminals. Power conservation techniques are commonly used in the hardware design of such systems. Since the network interface is a significant consumer of power, considerable research has been devoted to low-power design of the entire network protocol stack of wireless networks in an effort to enhance energy efficiency. This paper presents a comprehensive summary of recent work addressing energy efficient and low-power design within all layers of the wireless network protocol stack.

Power-saving is a critical issue for almost all kinds of portable devices. In this paper, we consider the design of power-saving protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) that allow mobile hosts to switch to a low-power sleep mode. The MANETs being considered in this paper are characterized by unpredictable mobility, multi-hop communication, and no clock synchronization mechanism. In particular, the last characteristic would complicate the problem since a host has to predict when another host will wake up to receive packets. We propose three power management protocols, namely dominating-awake-interval, periodically-fully-awake-interval, and quorum-based protocols, which are directly applicable to IEEE 802.11based MANETs. As far as we know, the power management problem for multi-hop MANETs has not been seriously addressed in the literature. Existing standards, such as IEEE 802.11, HIPERLAN, and bluetooth, all assume that the network is fully connected or there is a clock synchronization mechanism. Extensive simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed protocols.

Efficient routing among a set of mobile hosts (also called nodes) is one of the most important functions in ad hoc wireless networks. Routing based on a connected dominating set is a promising approach, where the searching space for a route is reduced to nodes in the set. A set is dominating if all the nodes in the system are either in the set or neighbors of nodes in the set. Wu and Li [1] proposed a simple and efficient distributed algorithm for calculating connected dominating set in ad hoc wireless networks, where connections of nodes are determined by geographical distances of nodes. In general, nodes in the connected dominating set consume more energy in order to handle various bypass traffics than nodes outside the set. To prolong the life span of each node, and hence, the network by balancing the energy consumption in the network, nodes should be alternated in being chosen to form a connected dominating set. In this paper, we propose a method of calculating power-aware connected dominating set. Our simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms several existing approaches in terms of life span of the network.

The recent availability of small, inexpensive low-power GPS receivers and techniques for finding relative coordinates based on signal strengths, and the need for the design of powerefficient and scalable networks provided justification for applying position-based routing methods in ad hoc networks. A number of such algorithms were developed recently. This tutorial will concentrate on schemes that are loop-free, localized, and follow a single-path strategy, which are desirable characteristics for scalable routing protocols. Routing protocols have two modes: greedy mode (when the forwarding node is able to advance the message toward the destination) and recovery mode (applied until return to greedy mode is possible). We shall discuss them separately. Methods also differ in metrics used (hop count, power, cost, congestion, etc.), and in past traffic memorization at nodes (memoryless or memorizing past traffic). Salient properties to be emphasized in this review are guaranteed delivery, scalability, and robustness.

Network throughput and packet delay are two important parameters in the design and the evaluation of routing protocols for ad-hoc networks. While mobility has been shown to increase the capacity of a network, it is not clear whether the delay can be kept low without trading off the throughput. We consider a theoretical framework and propose a routing algorithm which exploits the patterns in the mobility of nodes to provide guarantees on the delay. Moreover, the throughput achieved by the algorithm is only a poly-logarithmic factor off from the optimal. The algorithm itself is fairly simple. In order to analyze its feasibility and the performance guarantee, we used various techniques of probabilistic analysis of algorithms. The approach taken in this paper could be applied to the analyses of some other routing algorithms for mobile ad hoc networks proposed in the literature.

Abstract. We analyze an architecture based on mobility to address the problem of energy efficient data collection in a sensor network. Our approach exploits mobile nodes present in the sensor field as forwarding agents. As a mobile node moves in close proximity to sensors, data is transferred to the mobile node for later depositing at the destination. We present an analytical model to understand the key performance metrics such as data transfer, latency to the destination, and power. Parameters for our model include: sensor buffer size, data generation rate, radio characteristics, and mobility patterns of mobile nodes. Through simulation we verify our model and show that our approach can provide substantial savings in energy as compared to the traditional ad-hoc network approach.

In the near future, the advent of large-scale networks of mobile agents autonomously performing long-term sensing and communication tasks will be upon us. However, using controlled node mobility to improve communication performance is a capability that the mobile networking community has not yet investigated. In this paper, we study mobility as a network control primitive. More specifically, we present the first mobility control scheme for improving communication performance in such networks. Our scheme is completely distributed, requiring each node to possess only local information. Our scheme is self-adaptive, being able to transparently encompass several modes of operation, each respectively improving power efficiency for one unicast flow, multiple unicast flows, and many-to-one concast flows. We provide extensive evaluations on the feasibility of mobility control, showing that controlled mobility can improve network performance in many scenarios. This work constitutes a novel application of distributed control to networking in which underlying network communication serves as input to local control rules that guide the system toward a global objective.

Most existing work on sensor networks concentrates on finding efficient ways to forward data from the information source to the data centers, and not much work has been done on collecting local data and generating the data report. This paper studies this issue by proposing techniques to detect and track a mobile target. We introduce the concept of dynamic convoy tree-based collaboration, and formalize it as a multiple objective optimization problem which needs to find a convoy tree sequence with high tree coverage and low energy consumption. We propose an optimal solution which achieves 100% coverage and minimizes the energy consumption under certain ideal situations. Considering the real constraints of a sensor network, we propose several practical implementations: the conservative scheme and the prediction-based scheme for tree expansion and pruning; the sequential and the localized reconfiguration schemes for tree reconfiguration. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare the practical implementations and the optimal solution. The results show that the prediction-based scheme outperforms the conservative scheme and it can achieve similar coverage and energy consumption to the optimal solution. The experiments also show that the localized reconfiguration scheme outperforms the sequential reconfiguration scheme when the node density is high, and the trend is reversed when the node density is low.

It was recently reported that all known face and combined greedy-face routing variants cannot guarantee message delivery in arbitrary undirected planar graphs. The purpose of this article is to clarify that this is not the truth in general. We show that specifically in relative neighborhood and Gabriel graphs recovery from a greedy routing failure is always possible without changing between any adjacent faces. Guaranteed delivery then follows from guaranteed recovery while traversing the very first face. In arbitrary graphs, however, a proper face selection mechanism is of importance since recovery from a greedy routing failure may require visiting a sequence of faces before greedy routing can be restarted again. A prominent approach is to visit a sequence of faces which are intersected by the line connecting the source and destination node. Whenever encountering an edge which is intersecting with this line, the critical part is to decide if face traversal has to change to the next adjacent one or not. Failures may occur from incorporating face routing procedures that force to change the traversed face at each intersection. Recently observed routing failures which were produced by the GPSR protocol in arbitrary planar graphs result from incorporating such a face routing variant. They cannot be constructed by the well known GFG algorithm which does not force changing the face anytime. Beside methods which visit the faces intersected by the source destination line, we discuss face routing variants which simply restart face routing whenever the next face has to be explored. We give the first complete and formal proofs that several proposed face routing, and combined greedyface routing schemes do guarantee delivery in specific graph classes or even any arbitrary planar graphs. We also discuss the reasons why other methods may fail to deliver a message or even end up in a loop.