Alternatives to Binary Routing Policies Applied to a Military MANET Coalition

New generation radio equipment, used by soldiers and vehicles on the battlefield, form ad hoc networks and specifically, Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANET). The battlefields where these equipment are deployed include a majority of coalition communication. Each group on the battleground may communicate with other members of the coalition and establish inter-MANET links. These interMANET links are governed by routing policies that can be summarized as Allowed or Denied link. However, if more than two groups form a coalition, blocked multihop communications and non-desired transmissions due to these restrictive policies would appear. In this paper, we present these blocking cases and theoretically evaluate their apparition frequency. Then, we present two alternatives to extend the binary policies and decrease the number of blocking cases. Finally, we describe an experimental scenario containing a blocking case and evaluate our propositions and their performance.