Unicast Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Present and Future Directions

摘要

Recent advances in portable computing and wireless technologies are opening up exciting possibilities for the future of wireless mobile networks. A MANET (Mobile Ad Hoc NETworks) is a self-organizing and a self-configuring network which does not require fixed infrastructure. In it, all nodes are capable of movement, and can be interconnected in an arbitrary manner. At present, unicast routing is a focus of research on MANETs. In this article, we will survey the unicast routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks. We are going to provide a detailed description of issues and protocols for unicast routing over MANETs. The future directions in research on unicast routing will be discussed, too. We hope that the discussion presented here will be helpful to application developers in selecting an appropriate unicast protocol and pave the way for future research.