Preface
Advances in communication and networking technologies are rapidly making ubiquitous network connectivity a reality. Wireless networks are indispensable for supporting such access anywhere and at any time. Among various types of wireless networks, multihop wireless networks (MWNs) have been attracting increasing attention for decades due to its broad civilian and military applications. Basically, a MWN is a network of nodes connected by wireless communication links. Due to the limited transmission range of the radio, many pairs of nodes in MWNs may not be able to communicate directly, hence they need other intermediate nodes to forward packets for them. Routing in such networks is an important issue and it poses great challenges.
On the one hand, due to its open-air nature, the wireless environment presents great challenges when attempting to ensure good routing performance. The wireless channel is unreliable due to fading and interference, which makes it hard to maintain a quality path between a source and a destination. A node's mobility also incurs frequent topology changes, which bring significant overheads on maintaining and recalculating paths. Furthermore, mobile devices and sensors are usually constrained by battery capacity and communication and computation capability, which imposes limitations on the functionality of routing protocols. On the other hand, the wireless medium possesses inherent unique characteristics, which can be exploited to enhance transmission ...
