A novel geocasting protocol for multi-interface tactical ad hoc networks

Geocasting is an efficient protocol for disseminating tactical messages to nodes within a specific area. Most of the geocasting protocols consider a single interface and single channel-based network. In such networks, the performance of geocasting does not scale with the increase in network size and the traffic load. One of the development trends in tactical networks is that communication equipment has multiple interfaces and channels. Thus, we propose an efficient geocasting protocol using multiple interfaces and channels in tactical ad hoc networks. The proposed scheme consists of two phases: packet forwarding and local flooding. In the forwarding scheme, the orthogonal channels are guaranteed at minimum two hops when a packet is delivered from a source to a geocast region and latency is reduced by using multiple channels in multi-hop packet delivery. In the local flooding, the latency and packet delivery ratio are enhanced by using the main channel and sub-channels in a distributed manner. Our simulation study using ns-2 shows that the proposed protocol outperforms the performance compared with other existing protocols.