Potential Area of Research in MANET

I. Introduction

The growth of laptop and 802.11/Wi-Fi wireless networking have made mobile Ad hoc NETworks(MANETs) a popular research topic since mid to late 1990s. Many academic papers evaluate protocols and abilities assuming varying degrees of mobility within a bounded space, usually with all nodes within a few hops of each other and usually with nodes sending data at a constant rate. Different protocols are then evaluated based on the packet drop rate, the overhead introduced by the routing protocols and other measures. Over the last few years MANET has attracted a lot of research interest. This has led to creation of a working group at the IETF that is focusing on mobile ad hoc networking called MANET(2002). The purpose of MANET working group is to standardize IP routing protocols functionality suitable for wireless routing application within both static and dynamic topologies with increased dynamics due to node motion and other factors.

Research in MANET is like playing in a vast playground with only few known rules and large number of unknown rules applied to its different areas. Some areas are still unknown and some areas are at its early stage. Some of the research challenges that MANET present are dynamic topologies, battery lifetime, disconnected operations, security etc. In general there are three types of MANET-vehicular ad hoc networks, intelligent vehicular ad hoc network and internet based mobile ad hoc networks. Each of these three types has its own research areas. This can be better defined by the following in Box 1.

This chapter will be fully devoted to find and demonstrate various potential research areas of MANET. This chapter is divided into the following seven sections. Section II discusses research topics related to routing in MANET. Section III will have research topics related to quality of service in MANET. Section IV discusses the research topics related to energy management and battery power in MANET. Section V discusses research topics related to security in MANET. Section VI will discuss new research areas in MANET. Section VII will have table of open problems in MANET.

Ii. Routing In Manet

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes that out of necessity form a network required to facilitate communication. Because the nodes have limited energy storage, computing power and communication ability, designing an energy efficient protocol is a challenge(Roche, Westphall, Pack and Mecklenburg, 2002).