An open architecture for the routing protocols design in ad hoc networks

A huge number of routing protocols have been proposed for ad hoc networks to improve the networks' performance. Because of the large number of designs, it's difficult to track all the designs and choose the optimal protocol for an ad hoc network under various scenarios. In addition, it is not clear if any of the original design ideas in the huge number of existing works can be combined to form new and better routing systems. To address this challenge, in this paper, a new open architecture is proposed, called Orchestra, which aims to bring a great change to the current design process of ad hoc routing protocols. The architecture can automatically assemble and test of a great variety of routing designs with high flexibility and compatibility by the help of routing algebra. Furthermore, it can also be combined with other algorithms like genetic algorithm to find the most suitable protocol design for a certain network scenario. The performance of the existing routing protocols implemented in Orchestra is as same as their original version in ns2, as which is shown in our simulation result.