A TORA-based Wireless Protocol for MANET with Low Routing Overhead at Link Layer

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is an emerging technology that allows users to transmit data without any physical infrastructure. Among those MANET protocols, Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA) is an on-demand MANET routing protocol that attempts to find routes according to the directed acyclic graph (DAG). However, the TORA protocol requires strict synchronization. The routing overhead of TORA will increase linearly with the packet transmission rate. Motivated by Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL), we propose an ad hoc link-layer protocol called TORA-based Wireless Protocol (TWP) in this article. TWP can be deployed on embedded devices with Linux-kernel systems. Besides, it has unique frame structures and mechanisms. Also, it can implement synchronization and a TORA-like routing function at the link layer. We analyze the performance of TWP via experiments on Raspberry Pis. The results show that TWP can perform routing and data transmission successfully. It performs well in synchronization and can effectively reduce the routing overhead during the process of network routing.