Rank-aware Tree-based Geographical Routing for tactical mobile Ad-hoc networks

Tactical mobile ad hoc networks have a hierarchical organization with soldiers reporting to their group leader and from them to the command center. In such a network, it is important to prioritize the traffic associated with the leaders without starving other essential communication in the network. To support such a feature, we propose a hybrid routing protocol, named as “Rank-aware Tree-based Geographical Routing (RTGR),” that comprises of rank-aware tree and geographical routing techniques. The rank-aware tree routing is designed to support high priority traffics between ordinary nodes and their group leaders by utilizing the shortest-path algorithm with a consideration of the chain of command, while the rank-aware geographical routing is designed to support relatively lower priority traffics and hence intends to avoid any unnecessary resource competition with the higher ones. This approach favors priority traffic for providing needful resource for achieving better reliability with lower overhead in the network. The performance evaluation is conducted using the OPNET simulator, showing significant improvement in packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and reliability.