Potential Area of Research in MANET
The growth of laptop and 802.11/Wi-Fi wireless networking have made Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) a popular research topic since the mid to late 1990s. Many academic papers evaluate protocols and abilities assuming varying degrees of mobility within a bounded space, usually with all nodes within a few hops of each other and usually with nodes sending data at a constant rate. Different protocols are then evaluated based on the packet drop rate, the overhead introduced by the routing protocols, and other measures. Research in MANET is like playing in a vast playground with only few known rules and large number of unknown rules applied to its different areas. Some areas are still unknown and some areas are at its early stage. Some of the research challenges that MANET present are dynamic topologies, battery lifetime, disconnected operations, security, et cetera. In general there are three types of MANET: vehicular ad hoc networks, intelligent vehicular ad hoc network, and Internet based mobile ad hoc networks. Each of these three types has its own research areas.