The former has the side effect that in an ever changing network topology, stale routes will appear often. While when the latter is applied to a network containing nodes with high rate of mobility, it might result in control messages consuming all the available bandwidth. This could also lead to very slow network convergence where nodes contain either incomplete or out-of-date views of the network topology.

Saving battery power in the participating nodes of a mobile ad-hoc network is an important challenge. In many kinds of mobile ad-hoc networks, mobile nodes usually rely on exhaustible means for providing energy, such as batteries. For these nodes, energy conservation suddenly becomes an important design decision.

Nodes with low battery power may decide to enter a power saving mode when they having nothing to send, or until another high priority event is generated. This behaviour might affect the way the whole network is operating, since each node is responsible for forwarding another node's packets in addition to its own. If nodes decide to become "selfish" and break the collective and cooperative nature of mobile ad-hoc networking by not forwarding another node's data, the mobile ad-hoc architecture is endangered. A multitude of other problems and design trade-offs are concerned with power utilization in such networks, and this particular area is becoming the focus of increased attention.

In summary, the critical features of mobile ad-hoc networks could broadly be classified as Quantitative and Qualitative critical feature types. In the following paragraph I'll list some of the quantitative and qualitative features of mobile ad-hoc networks.

Quantitative features
The following are some of the quantitative features of a mobile ad-hoc network.

Network settling time can be defined as the time required for a collection of mobile wireless nodes to automatically organize itself and transmit the message reliably. Network Join Time is the time required for an entering node, or groups of nodes, to become integrated into the mobile ad-hoc network. Network Depart time is the time required for the network to recognize the loss of one or more nodes and reorganize itself to route around the departed nodes.

Network Recovery time is the time required for a collapsed portion of the network due to traffic overload, or node failures, to become functional again once the load is reduced or the nodes become operational. Frequency of updates or network overhead can be defined as the number of control packets required in a given period to maintain proper network operation in an ad-hoc network. Memory requirement is the storage space requirements in bytes, including routing tables. Network scalability is the number of nodes the mobile ad-hoc network can scale to and reliably preserve communication.

Qualitative critical features
Some of the critical qualitative features are the location information of mobile nodes. Does the routing algorithm require local or global knowledge of the network? The effect of topology changes, or how routing algorithms cope with the frequent topology changes in an ad-hoc network is important as well, i.e. does it need complete restructuring or only incremental updates?