Mobile Ad hoc Networks: Challenges and Future

Over the next 10 years, it is predicted that significant qualitative changes to the Internet will be driven by the rapid proliferation of mobile devices, which may be expected to outnumber wired PC’s or in other words the existing system. Wireless devices on the Internet will include laptop computers, personal digital assistants, cell phones, portable media players, etc. along with embedded sensors used to sense and control physical world objects and events. As mobile computing devices and wireless sensors are deployed in large numbers, the Internet will increasingly serve as the interface between people moving around and the physical world that surrounds them. Emerging capabilities for finding, querying and controlling physical world objects and events via the Internet will result in a broad new class of applications tightly integrated with the way people live and work. The potential impact of the future wireless Internet is very significant because the network combines the power of computation search engines and databases in the background with the immediacy of information from mobile users and sensors in the foreground. power of computation, search engines and databases in the background with the immediacy of information from mobile users and sensors in the foreground. The data flows and interactions between mobile users, sensors and their supporting computing infrastructure are clearly very different from those of today’s popular Internet applications such as email, instant messaging or the world-wide web. Supporting these requirements efficiently in an integrated wired-wireless global network will require major changes. Thus, broadly in this paper we propose the major challenges faced by the internet architecture in incorporating emerging wireless network elements such as mobile terminals, ad-hoc routers and embedded sensors and to provide end-to-end service abstractions that facilitate application development