Impact of Duplicate Forwarding-Keys on WALS-Based MANETs

In the Wireless Arithmetic Label Switching (WALS) architecture and its directional extension, WALS-DA (Directional Antennas), for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), forwarding keys are assigned to nodes or links to enable efficient arithmetic label-based forwarding. However, the inevitable reuse of forwarding keys in WALS introduces anomalous forwarding behaviors and degrades network performance. WALS (nodebased key assignment) and WALS-DA (edge-based key assignment), without addressing specific mitigation strategies. Through extensive simulations using cellular network topologies, we identify distinct conflict propagation patterns between the two architectures. Results demonstrate that internal and external conflicts scale with key duplication rates. However, WALSDAs finer-grained key assignment reduces internal conflicts while significantly amplifying external conflicts under high key reuse. This study comprehensively characterizes the duplicate-label problem in WALS-based routing, providing foundational insights for future improvements in WALSbased MANET forwarding design.