Comprehensive survey on multi attribute decision making methods for wireless ad hoc networks

Recently, to design dynamic networks without existing infrastructure, wireless ad hoc networks have been proposed to establish self-organizing networks. In this type of network, to resolve the primary research challenge of establishing a stable path between source and destination, several metrics or utility values have been proposed to meet the specific objectives, as well as improve packet delivery ratio when developing communication protocols or addressing technical issues. Notably, most existing studies use the Multi Attribute Decision Making (MADM) algorithm to balance weights between relevant metrics to realize the above objective. However, despite their significant efforts, a comprehensive survey paper analyzing them together has not been published. Thus, in this paper, we describe the recent research and development efforts to employ MADM in ad hoc networks. First, we provide an overview of MADM and explain the well-known algorithms. After categorizing the current work according to the algorithms, the existing schemes are further divided by the type of networks. Based on this classification, we then detail the procedures with their research objectives. Furthermore, we present other research challenges and apparent problems in this research area.