In this paper, we will establish the existence and nonexistence of traveling waves for nonlinear cellular neural networks with finite or infinite distributed delays. The dynamics of each given cell depends on itself and its nearest m left or I right neighborhood cells where delays exist in self-feedback and left or right neighborhood interactions. Our approach is to use Schauder's fixed point theorem coupled with upper and lower solutions of the integral equation in a suitable Banach space. Further, we obtain the exponential asymptotic behavior in the negative infinity and the existence of traveling waves for the minimal wave speed by the limiting argument. Our results improve and cover some previous works. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Inc.