Wireless Multi-hop Ad-hoc Networks: A Review

Over the past decade wireless multi-hop ad-hoc networks have received a tremendous amount of research focus. Mobile devices equipped with wireless short range communication technologies make possible new applications for spontaneous communication, interaction and collaboration. The collaboration is used to facilitate communication when mobile devices are not able to establish direct communication paths. So the communication is multi-hop with intermediate nodes acting as routers that forward the messages addressed to other nodes. The concept of multi-hop ad-hoc networking was successfully applied in several classes of networks. This paper reviews the categories of wireless multi-hop ad-hoc networks and discusses main evolutions of wireless multi-hop ad-hoc networks specially the opportunistic networks.