Protection and restoration in ad hoc wireless networks

Protection has been among the most important issues for optical networks due to the requirements of reliability and quality-of-service (QoS). In this paper, we advocate applying protection and restoration to wireless networks. Due to the mobility of mobile users/routers and the interference and high error-rates for radio communications, protection and restoration can considerably enhance the capability for QoS provisioning in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) and ad hoc cellular network (ACENET). We propose several strategies to transform previous protection techniques for optical networks to obtain geographical wireless protection techniques for wireless networks. We also present several backbone-sharing protection and weaved protection techniques that are particularly developed for MANET and ACENET.