An ad hoc mobile network (MANET), also known as ad hoc wireless network or ad hoc wireless network, is a network of wireless mobile devices that are configured continuously and without infrastructure.
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 send traffic unrelated to its own use, and therefore be a router. The primary challenge in building a MANET is to equip each device to continuously maintain the information required to properly route traffic. Such networks may function 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 ad hoc wireless network (WANET) that typically have a routable network environment at the top of 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 MANET a popular research topic since the mid-1990s. Many academic papers 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...