26 ◾ IP Communications and Services for NGN
areas, festival grounds, outdoor assemblies, and rescue actions, locations where net-
works need to be deployed immediately but the base station or fixed infrastructure
is not available. For example, in an earthquake disaster, all the stations may be
down if there is no electricity. In this scenario, a MANET driven by battery power
can be used to set up a network environment [12, 15].
MANETs address some of the cellular mobile network limitations. However,
the absence of any dedicated fixed switching/forwarding agent, and the uncertain
and frequent mobility of a node, are aspects that make ad-hoc networks unstable.
Even if the end node is not moving, it can also remain unstable because of interme-