TITLE:
A P2P Approach to Routing in Hierarchical MANETs
AUTHORS:
Thomas Kunz, Silas Echegini, Babak Esfandiari
KEYWORDS:
MANET, Routing, Hierarchical Networks, DHT, P2P, Chord, OLSR, OMNeT++
JOURNAL NAME:
Communications and Network,
Vol.12 No.3,
August
17,
2020
ABSTRACT: We present an effective routing solution for the backbone of hierarchical
MANETs. Our solution leverages the storage and retrieval mechanisms
of a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) common to many (structured) P2P overlays. The DHT provides routing information in a
decentralized fashion, while supporting different forms of node and
network mobility. We split a flat network into clusters, each having a gateway
who participates in a DHT overlay. These gateways
interconnect the clusters in a backbone network. Two routing approaches
for the backbone are explored: flooding
and a new solution exploiting the storage and
retrieval capabilities of a P2P overlay based on a DHT. We implement both approaches in a network
simulator and thoroughly evaluate the
performance of the proposed scheme using a range of static and mobile
scenarios. We also compare our solution against flooding. The simulation results
show that our solution, even in the presence of mobility, achieved well above 90% success rates and maintained very low and
constant round trip times, unlike the flooding approach. In fact, the
performance of the proposed inter-cluster
routing solution, in many cases, is comparable to the performance of the intra-cluster routing case. The
advantage of our proposed approach compared to flooding increases as the
number of clusters increases, demonstrating the superior scalability of our
proposed approach.