A Study of Different Routing Protocols for Mobile Phone Ad Hoc Networks Connected via Bluetooth

The growth of mobile computing is changing the way people communicate. Mobile devices, especially mobile phones, have become cheaper and more powerful, and are able to run more applications and provide networking services. Mobile phones use fixed cellular infrastructure like base stations and transmission towers to enable users to share multimedia content and access the Internet anytime, anywhere. However, using telecommunications infrastructure introduces costs. Therefore, one of the solutions is to create impromptu ad hoc networks share information amongst users. Such networks are infrastructureless and organizing themselves, much like mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). This paper investigates how mobile phones with low power Bluetooth technology can be used to create ad hoc networks that allow them to share information. The mobile phones should be able to organize themselves at the application layer of the Bluetooth protocol stack for multi-hop communication. Routing becomes important in order to achieve efficiency in data communication. Several existing routing protocols were implemented and evaluated for this type of network to determine how efficiently they deliver data and deal with network disruptions like a device moving out of transmission range.