Lightweight Mobile Ad-hoc Network Routing Protocols for Smartphones

Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is one of the promising wireless networking approaches where a group of wireless devices can establish communication among themselves without any infrastructure. MANET has successfully been implemented in the emergency communication, battlefield and Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) etc. Recently, MANET has also been studied to establish village level off-thegrid telephony system using mobile phones (smartphones). As the mobile phones and other modern electronic devices are increasingly equipped with efficient wireless Wi-Fi devices, phone based MANET implementation will open new horizons for off-the-self services for phones as well as IoT implementations. However, current MANET routing protocols show poor performances in implementing MANET among mobile phones due to the requirements of high memory, commutation power and high energy usage. The performance seriously degrades when the number of phones increases in the network. Therefore, a lightweight routing protocol is the key requirement for successful implementation of MANET using mobile phones. This report presents relevant routing protocol designs and their applicability to develop lightweight MANET routing protocols for mobile phones. In conclusion, we have presented the challenges and research directions in this field.