A Comprehensive Survey on Multi-hop Wireless Networks: Milestones, Changing Trends and Concomitant Challenges

With remarkable advancements in the fields of global satellite based navigation systems and wireless communication networks, there is a tremendous increase in the number of mobile device users throughout the globe. Each day, new arduous projects and applications utilizing mobile devices are evolving, with a prime motive to deploy wireless multi-hop networks into the real world. As these networks are, in general, deployed in extreme environmental conditions their performance evaluation is a matter of great concern and demands rigorous analysis. Several models, simulators, testbeds and visualization tools have evolved in the last two decades for analyzing the characteristics of these wireless multi-hop networks. In this paper, first we discuss a number of models and the changing trends of research along with the associated challenges. Then, we discuss several simulators, emulators, testbeds and real world projects implementing such networks. Besides, we also discuss an important aspect of wireless multi-hop networks, i.e., reliability and identify various imperative metrics from the literature for performance evaluation of such dynamic networks.