An ad hoc mobile network (MANET), also known as ad hoc wireless network or ad hoc wireless network, is a network of wireless, self-configuring mobile devices.
Each device in a MANET is free to move independently in any direction, and therefore will change its links to other devices frequently. Each should forward traffic unrelated to their own use, and therefore be a router. The main challenge in building a MANET is to equip each device to continuously maintain the information required to properly direct traffic. Such networks may operate by themselves or may be connected to the larger Internet. They may contain one or multiple and different transceivers between nodes. This results in a highly dynamic and autonomous topology.
MANETs are a type of wireless ad hoc network (WANET) that typically has a routable network environment above an ad hoc link layer network. MANETs consist of a peer-to-peer, self-training, self-healing network. MANETs around 2000-2015 are normally communicated at radio frequencies (30 MHz - 5 GHz).
The growth of laptops and 802.11 / Wi-Fi wireless networks have made MANETs a popular research topic since the mid-1990s. Many academic documents evaluate protocols and their capabilities, assuming different degrees of mobility within a limited space, usually with all nodes within a few jumps of each other. We then evaluate different protocols based on measures such as packet drop rate, overload introduced by routing protocol, end-to-end packet delays, network performance, scalability etc....