On Separating Route Control and Data Flows in Multi-radio Multi-hop Ad Hoc Network

Ad hoc networks typically require a significant amount of routing and control information to be distributed in a timely and reliable manner throughout the network, particularly in dynamic environments. As traffic levels increase and the network becomes more heavily congested, there is an increased probability that these critical packets are lost, resulting in obsolete control information being used to make important decisions. This would further compound the problem of network congestion and lead to a very rapid loss of connectivity and throughput. Given this, we argue the solutions to these problems should not rely on putting extra bandwidth on a radio interface. Instead, we should exploit the use of multiple radios to ensure the route can be firmly established. In this paper, we propose a multi-radio solution which reserves one radio channel exclusively for routing. Our simulation results have demonstrated that using a separate radio for routing protocol would dramatically improve reliability in heavily loaded ad hoc wireless networks, thereby effectively alleviating the impact of network congestion.