Transparent IP Proxy for Tactical Ad Hoc Networks

This paper presents an adaptive and controllable framework to optimize the transport of IP packets in military MANETs. The HBH (Hop-By-Hop) protocol that we propose uses a combination of hop-by-hop reliability and congestion mitigation mechanisms. Its major advantage is to run any standard IP application unmodified on top of the network. Moreover it is able to improve flow performance in terms of latency or goodput. HBH is tunable and provides a target level of hop-by-hop reliability. It uses a transmission window and selective acknowledgements to improve bandwidth usage. We present the HBH protocol components, mechanisms and parameters. We carried out an implementation of HBH very close to a Linux implementation and validated it in the NS3 simulator. Finally, we demonstrate how HBH can improve TCP performance on a four-node chain topology by providing the right amount of additional reliability that the end-to-end TCP connection requires to overcome lossy conditions.