Mobile ad hoc network in the context of Packet forwarding

An ad hoc network refers to technologies that allow network communications on an ad hoc basis. Associated technologies include:

• Wireless ad hoc network
• Mobile ad hoc network
• Vehicular ad hoc network
  • Intelligent vehicular ad hoc network
• Protocols associated with ad hoc networking
  • Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing
  • Ad Hoc Configuration Protocol
• Smart phone ad hoc network
• Ad hoc wireless distribution service

A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a proposed type of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) involving road vehicles. VANETs were first proposed in 2001 as "car-to-car ad-hoc mobile communication and networking" applications, where networks could be formed and information could be relayed among cars. It has been shown that vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communications architectures could co-exist in VANETs to provide road safety, navigation, and other roadside services. VANETs could be a key part of the intelligent transportation systems (ITS) framework. Sometimes, VANETs are referred to as Intelligent Transportation Networks. They could evolve into a broader "Internet of vehicles". which itself could evolve into an "Internet of autonomous vehicles".

While, in the early 2000s, VANETs were seen as a mere one-to-one application of MANET principles, they have since then developed into a field of research in their own right. By 2015, the term VANET became mostly synonymous with the more generic term inter-vehicle communication (IVC), although the focus remains on the aspect of spontaneous networking, much less on the use of infrastructure like Road Side Units (RSUs) or cellular networks.

An ad hoc routing protocol is a convention, or standard, that controls how nodes decide which way to route packets between computing devices in a mobile ad hoc network.

In ad hoc networks, nodes are not familiar with the topology of their networks. Instead, they have to discover it: typically, a new node announces its presence and listens for announcements broadcast by its neighbors. Each node learns about others nearby and how to reach them, and may announce that it too can reach them.

Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) Routing is a routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and other wireless ad hoc networks. It was jointly developed by Charles Perkins (Sun Microsystems) and Elizabeth Royer (now Elizabeth Belding) (University of California, Santa Barbara) and was first published in the ACM 2nd IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications in February 1999.

AODV is the routing protocol used in Zigbee – a low power, low data rate wireless ad hoc network. There are various implementations of AODV such as MAD-HOC, Kernel-AODV, AODV-UU, AODV-UCSB and AODV-UIUC.

Ad hoc Wireless Distribution Service (AWDS) is a layer 2 routing protocol to connect mobile ad hoc networks, sometimes called wireless mesh networks. It is based on a link-state routing protocol, similar to OLSR.