Unicast Routing Techniques for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Roberto Beraldi, Roberto Baldoni · The electrical engineering handbook/Electrical engineering handbook series/Electrical engineering handbook · 2002
A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is an autonomous system of functionally equivalent mobile nodes, which must be able to communicate while moving, without any kind of wired infrastructure. At this end, mobile nodes must cooperate to provide the routing service. Routing in mobile environments is challenging due to the constraints existing on the resources (transmission bandwidth, CPU time and battery power) and the required ability for the protocol to effectively track topological changes. This paper discusses the issue of routing in mobile ad-hoc networks by focusing on the main solutions proposed in the literature to cope with mobility. The paper surveys the techniques adopted for the case of unicast routing, i.e. when it is required to send a packet from a source node to a destination node, by illustrating how they are introduced into the main representative protocols.