Middleware issues and approaches for mobile ad hoc networks

Recently, there has been a growing interest in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) that offer a broad spectrum of new applications. However, application development for MANETs is not easy. Obviously, solving these issues for each application from scratch is not feasible. Instead, developing middleware services to support the development of such applications is a novel approach that will offer many possibilities, and considerable flexibility for ad hoc networking. This survey shows the current state of the research in this domain by presenting and discussing some representative middleware for wireless MANET. The selection of methods tries to cover as many views and objectives as possible. We concentrate on discovering similarities and differences between the approaches by making comparisons, evaluation and appropriateness studies. Then we argue that most of the work is at fledging stage and there is still a long way to go for such middleware to fully meet MANET applications requirements.