Wireless Ad-hoc Networks

Deployed in 1990’s, Mobile Ad-hoc networks have been widely researched for many years. Mobile Ad-hoc Networks are a collection of two or more devices equipped with wireless communications and networking capability. These devices can communication with other nodes that immediately within their radio range or one that is outside their radio range. For the later, the nodes should deploy an intermediate node to be the router to route the packet from the source toward the destination. The Wireless Ad-hoc Networks do not have gateway, every node can act as the gateway. Although since 1990s’, lots of research has been done on this particular field, it has often been questioned as to whether the architecture of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks is a fundamental flawed architecture. The main reason for the argument is that Mobile Ad-hoc Networks are almost never used in practice, almost every wireless network nodes communicate to base-station and access points instead of co-operating to forward packets hop-by-hop. We take the position that Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) are a fundamentally flawed architecture. As argument, we try to clarify the definition, architecture and the characters of MANET, as well as the main challenges of constructing the MANET. Although many works have been done to solve the problem, we will show in this paper that it is very difficult to solve these limitations which made the Mobile Ad-hoc Networks a flawed architecture. After giving many evidences and analysis, we could see that the key technologies of Wireless Ad-hoc Networks were not implemented as well as we expect. That is to say, many problems are inherently unsolvable. Thus, we could explain why we take the position that Mobile Ad-hoc Networks are flawed architecture.