Software-Defined Architecture for Infrastructure-less Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Most existing Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architectures for ad hoc networks impose one or more of the following constraints: infrastructure support, out-of-band single-hop (direct) links, location tracking, or preexisting IP connectivity. These limitations make the existing architectures inadequate for managing infrastructure-less Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) having limited bandwidth, unreliable connectivity, and susceptibility to high interference, packet collisions, and losses. In our dissertation, we design an architecture for Software-Defined Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (SD-MANET) that does not have any of the above constraints. We present three centralized communication protocols catering to MANET's need for proactive, reactive, and hierarchical routing strategies. We also develop two decentralized zero-control-packet routing protocols for MANETs characterized by ultra-low data rates. We present theoretical analyses of our protocols and perform simulation experiments addressing a wide range of scenarios: network scalability, density, traffic load, node mobility, and data rate. The results indicate that our solutions provide better performance than state-of-the-art approaches in most scenarios and address the inherent MANET challenges.