Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) Are Not A Fundamentally Flawed Architecture

Millions of people nowadays have portable computers and they generally want to read their e-mail and access their normal file systems wherever in the world they may be. This demand for mobility has fueled the rapid progression of computer & communication technologies from networks consisting of both stationary hosts & routers, to networks consisting of mobile hosts and stationary routers, and more recently to the other extreme case of networks having both mobile hosts and mobile routers. This last case of infrastructure-less networks of mobile hosts and mobile routers are called ad hoc networks or MANETs (Mobile Ad Hoc NETworks). It has been claimed that MANETs are a fundamentally flawed architecture. This is because Mobile Ad Hoc networks are almost never used in practice and almost every wireless network nodes communicate to base-stations and access points, instead of co-operating to forward packets hopby-hop. In this paper, we take the position that MANETs cannot be declared a fundamentally flawed architecture. The reasoning behind this position is that MANETs are still an emerging technology that has received intensive attention only recently. All aspects of the MANET concept are yet to be identified and fully understood. Research on MANETs is still in its early stages and considerable research effort is still necessary.