Heterogeneous ad hoc networks: Architectures, advances and challenges

The Heterogeneous Ad Hoc Networks (HANETs) are important components of the Internet of things, which become an inevitable trend in the future researches and applications. In recent years, the ad hoc networks have been widely employed in many fields, especially in environment monitoring, weapon control, intelligent transportation, smart city and other domains. HANETs consist of wireless sensor networks, smart ad hoc networks, wireless fidelity networks, telecommunication networks, vehicular ad hoc networks, etc. The digital information and physical objects are integrated through appropriate communication methods, thus new applications and services are created. Different applications use the independent network structures, which form a heterogeneous network platform and increase operational complexity of communication between each other. This paper presents a typical architecture of the large-scale HANETs, and investigates research advances of the current key technologies. To address existing issues, we suggest some potential solutions to deal with the current challenges, such as self-organization, big data transmission, privacy protection, data fusion and processing for large-scale HANETs.