A study of research trends and issues in wireless ad hoc networks

TL;DR

This paper surveys recent research trends, challenges, and emerging models in wireless ad hoc networks, highlighting ongoing issues across protocol layers and future directions for development.

Contribution

It provides an updated comprehensive overview of current issues, solutions, and emerging models in wireless ad hoc networks, including ad hoc grids, clouds, mesh networks, and cognitive radio.

Findings

Identifies key issues at different protocol layers.

Highlights emerging models like ad hoc clouds and cognitive radio.

Suggests future research directions and ignored areas.

Abstract

Ad hoc network enables network creation on the fly without support of any predefined infrastructure. The spontaneous erection of networks in anytime and anywhere fashion enables development of various novel applications based on ad hoc networks. However, at the same ad hoc network presents several new challenges. Different research proposals have came forward to resolve these challenges. This chapter provides a survey of current issues, solutions and research trends in wireless ad hoc network. Even though various surveys are already available on the topic, rapid developments in recent years call for an updated account on this topic. The chapter has been organized as follows. In the first part of the chapter, various ad hoc network's issues arising at different layers of TCP/IP protocol stack are presented. An overview of research proposals to address each of these issues is also provided. The second part of the chapter investigates various emerging models of ad hoc networks, discusses their distinctive properties and highlights various research issues arising due to these properties. We specifically provide discussion on ad hoc grids, ad hoc clouds, wireless mesh networks and cognitive radio ad hoc networks. The chapter ends with presenting summary of the current research on ad hoc network, ignored research areas and directions for further research.