SRPA: SDN-Based Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

For distributed routing algorithms in ad hoc networks, many control messages exchanges bring about excessive network delay and high-energy consumption. These weaknesses seriously deteriorate network performance and shorten lifetime of wireless nodes. Further, distributed operations are not good for updates of protocols and services, so that ad hoc networks are under restrictions in network management. This paper presents a novel SDN-based routing protocol named SRPA for ad hoc networks. SRPA removes routing decisions from general nodes to the controller. This strategy is able to detect shortest paths with low latency and reduce control messages exchanging effectively. We conduct experiments in OMNet++. The experimental results show that the route discovery time (RDT) and the round trip time (RTT), especially the first packet RTT, are shorter in SRPA than in AODV.