Ad-hoc wireless network

A wireless ad hoc network (WANET) or MANET is a decentralized type of wireless network. The network is ad hoc because it does not rely on a pre-existing infrastructure, such as routers in wired networks or access points in managed (infrastructure) wireless networks. Instead, each node participates in routing by forwarding data for other nodes, so the determination of which nodes forward data is made dynamically on the basis of network connectivity and the routing algorithm in use.

Wireless mobile ad hoc networks are self-configuring, dynamic networks in which nodes are free to move. Wireless networks lack the complexities of infrastructure setup and administration, enabling devices to create and join networks "on the fly" – anywhere, anytime.

The earliest wireless data network is called "packet radio" network, and was sponsored by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the early 1970s. Bolt, Beranek and Newman Technologies (BBN) and SRI International designed, built, and experimented with these earliest systems. Experimenters included Robert Kahn, Jerry Burchfiel, and Ray Tomlinson. Similar experiments took place in the Ham radio community with ax25 protocol. These early packet radio systems predated the Internet, and indeed were part of the motivation of the original Internet Protocol suite. Later DARPA experiments included the Survivable Radio Network (SURAN) project, which took place in the 1980s. Another third wave of academic activity started in the mid-1990s with the advent of inexpensive 802.11 radio cards for personal computers. Current wireless ad-hoc networks are designed primarily for military utility. Problems with packet radios are: (1) bulky elements, (2) slow data rate, (3) unable to maintain links if mobility is high. The project did not proceed much further until the early 1990s when wireless ad hoc networks are born.

In the early 1990s, Charles Perkins from SUN Microsystems USA, and Chai Keong Toh from Cambridge University separately started to work on a different Internet, that of a wireless ad hoc network. Perkins was working on the dynamic addressing issues. Toh worked on a new routing protocol, which was known as ABR – Associativity-Based Routing. Perkins eventually proposed DSDV – Destination Sequence Distance Vector routing, which was based on distributed distance vector routing. Toh's proposal was an on-demand based routing, i.e. routes are discovered on-the-fly in real-time as and when is needed. ABR was submitted to IETF as RFCs. ABR was implemented successfully into Linux OS on Lucent WaveLAN 802.11a enabled laptops and a practical ad hoc mobile network was therefore proven to be possible in 1999. Another routing protocol known as AODV was subsequently introduced and later proven and implemented in 2005. In 2007, David Johnson and Dave Maltz proposed DSR – Dynamic Source Routing.

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