Organization-aware routing in Mission Critical Networks

In a large mission critical wireless ad hoc network, heterogeneous nodes with different capabilities and nodes from different organizations may be deployed within the same geographical area. This is typical for many mission critical applications such as military networks. For such applications, on one hand, a node from one organization may collaborate with the nodes from a different organization for better survivability and efficiency. On the other hand, it is important to keep cross-organization data transfer at the lowest possible level for minimal disruption of the traffic within each organization and for security reasons. We propose a novel routing metric that both maximizes the benefits from the collaboration of heterogeneous nodes and takes the organizational constraints into account. Furthermore, we propose a novel routing protocol that may accommodate this new organization-aware metric, while backward compatible with the most popular routing protocols for general MANET, such as the optimized link state routing protocol (OLSR). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method provides the much needed survivability and efficiency in battlefield environment while keeping the cross-organization data transfer at a low level.