A comparison of MANET routing protocols on airborne tactical networks

In highly dynamic airborne networks, multi-hop routing becomes increasingly difficult due to high mobility, intermittent links and link quality, and the need to scale. Traditionally, airborne tactical networks have leveraged existing MANET proactive, reactive, and hybrid routing protocols with modifications for cross-layer information, to provide multihop routing. Although there has been some success with utilizing these protocols individually in airborne networks, a proper comparison of all types of MANET routing protocols at scale, with mobility patterns associated with airborne tactical networks, is lacking. In this paper, we compare a variety of proactive and reactive MANET routing protocols such as AODV, OLSR and OSPF-MDR, under relative node velocities and mobility patterns associated with airborne networks. Specifically, we evaluate each protocol in terms of routing overhead traffic, end-to-end message completion rate, and end-to-end delay, to examine performance vs. tradeoff.