Mobile agents routing-a survivable ad-hoc routing protocol

Military ad-hoc networks are a central component of the net-centric initiative. Ad-hoc routing protocols are required to sustain quality of service (QoS) requirements for network flows even under severe constraints. Our proposed protocol named mobile agents routing (MAR) is intended to be used on radio based packet networks in a military environment, therefore was designed to be reliable and robust with respect to dynamic and unplanned connectivity changes. The MAR protocol is a hybrid protocol. The proactive portion of the protocol establishes in each node a view of the available network, even before a flow is requested. The reactive component of the protocol will defer the selection of routes until each QoS based flow is requested. MAR is a flow based protocol and each flow has an established virtual private network (VPN) between source and destination. The presence of an expected VPN on ad-hoc routes brings potentially extra payoffs, such as, enhanced security, in network processing, etc. The usage of dynamic VPNs in ad-hoc routing as a means to keep QoS connections, requires the introduction of strong route repair and optimization techniques. As a result MAR has four levels of repair algorithms. In this paper, we present the mechanisms that compose the hybrid MAR protocol and present a simulation based performance comparison with AODV and OLSR.