Implementation and benchmarking of a novel routing protocol for tactical mobile ad-hoc networks

Providing efficient routing service over tactical multi-hop ad-hoc networks is a crucial building block in wireless communication networks especially during a disaster relief. To date, there is still a lack of routing standards for such networks. Indeed, in such harsh environment, medical rescue teams, firefighters, military, police and even victims need to be steadily connected to a distant command center (CC) which conducts the rescue operations. In this paper, we propose a new multi-hop routing approach called ORACE-Net. The proposed protocol uses advertisement packets to establish routes from deployed nodes towards the CC (i.e. Direct Route Establishment). Then, it utilizes the data packets to establish reverse routes (from the CC to all nodes in the network). We implemented and evaluated our approach in realistic scenario using tactical and on-body mobile nodes. Our experiments include also an Internet of Thing (IoT) platform and a real-time dynamic topology website which are used for analyzing the behavior of the protocol. The experimental results show that our protocol increases the mobile nodes connectivity and packet delivery rate. Also, it reduces the average round trip time delay for the on-body nodes compared to the tactical deployed base stations.