ABSTRACT
Wireless industry has seen an exponential growth in the last few years. The advancement in the growing availability of wireless networks and the emergence of handheld computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones is now playing a very important role in our daily routines. Surfing Internet from railway stations, airports, cafes, public locations, Internet browsing on cell phones, and information or file exchange between devices without a wired connectivity are just a few examples. All this ease is the result of the mobility of wireless devices while being connected to a gateway to access the Internet or information from a fixed or wired infrastructure (called infrastructurebased wireless network) or an ability to develop an ondemand, self-organizing wireless network without relying on any available fixed infrastructure (called ad hoc networks). A typical example of the first type of network is office wireless local area networks (WLANs), where a wireless access point serves all wireless devices within the radius. An example of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs)[1] can be described as a group of soldiers in a war zone, wirelessly connected to each other with the help of limited battery-powered devices and efficient ad hoc routing protocols that help them to maintain the quality of communication while they are changing their positions rapidly. Therefore, routing in ad hoc wireless networks plays an important role of a data forwarder, where each mobile node can act as a relay in addition to being a source or destination node.
