Topics in Ad Hoc and sensor networks

The mobile ad hoc networking field has produced several important theoretical results, but in terms of real world implementation and industrial deployment, such net works are suffering scarce exploitation and low interest from the industry and users. This, as discussed in the arti cles of the April 2007 issue of this Series, was mainly due to a lack of realism in the research approach/objectives that produced tons of scientific papers but only a very lim ited number of real deployments, with limited involvement of real users and no killer application. However, by learning the lessons of mobile ad hoc net working and exploiting the theoretical results in realistic networking scenarios, the scientific community has been able to design a set of novel mobile ad hoc networking paradigms that are currently penetrating the mass market. Mesh networks, where the multihop ad hoc networking paradigm is extended to include some infrastructure ele ments to provide a cost-effective wireless broadband exten sion of the Internet, is currently a reality, and we can find mesh network installations in many cities and campuses. While a more comprehensive analysis of those paradigms derived by Mobile Ad Hoc Networking, this issue presents two papers that survey the research in two of those paradigms: the vehicular networks and the opportunistic networks.