Performance characterization of ad hoc routing protocols with mobility awareness

In modern warfare, informational and situational awareness is vital to superiority on the battle field. In our previous work, we have shown that communication planning based on mission plans can greatly improve the performance of the tactical communication networks. In the Mobility Aware Routing Protocol (MARP) /Mobility Dissemination Protocol (MDP), this mission information is utilized to route traffic based on the knowledge of the Airborne Network topology with respect to time and make preemptive decisions to minimize packet losses due to link failures. However, it is always difficult for the wide body aircrafts to follow the prescribed trajectories accurately, leading to imperfections in the predicted topologies. In this paper, we extend the idea of mobility aware routing for situations where the mission information is inaccurate. We simulate different scenarios to introduce these imperfections and through stress tests and simulation studies, we have compared the performance of MARP/MDP with other standard Proactive Ad Hoc routing protocol like OLSR. Based on the scenarios of study, we have empirically observed that MARP/MDP always performs better than OLSR. In this paper, we also discuss and report performance parameters collected from an emulated Linux based testbed. We developed MARP/MDP routers using Zebra/Quagga routing protocol suite and used a real time Network Emulator to set up the experiments.