Routing in Ad Hoc Networks of Mobile Hosts

An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile hosts forming a temporary network without the aid of any centralized administration or standard support services. In such an environment, it may be necessary for one mobile host to enlist the aid of others in forwarding a packet to its destination, due to the limited propagation range of each mobile host's wireless transmissions. Some previous attempts have been made to use conventional routing protocols for routing in ad hoc networks, treating each mobile host as a router This position paper points out a number of problems with this design and suggests a new approach based on separate route discovery and route maintenance protocols.