IDHOCNET-A Novel Protocol Stack and Architecture for Ad hoc Networks

Abstract

Presently employed Internet Protocol (IP) stack possesses number of architectural problems. The issues like Dual/Overriding role of IP addresses, mobility, multi-homing etc are the limitations for the infrastructure oriented networks which even have support of Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Domain Name System (DNS), Network Address Translation (NAT) servers, etc. Such issues are extremely complex to handle in the case of multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks which lack the support of any infrastructure component. The contemporary research direction for the improvement of present Internet architecture mainly focuses on the use of real identifiers instead of IP addresses for host identification in the network. However, the proposed architectures mostly discuss the infrastructure oriented network models and minimal research has been conducted in the direction of proposals for ad hoc networks. In this paper we provide a thorough discussion on the practical usage issues of IP based ad hoc network implementation. In order to resolve the present limitations of ad hoc networks, we describe an implementation of a novel identifier based ad hoc network protocol stack and architecture known as IDHOCNET (Identifier based ad hoc network). The architecture proposes a novel paradigm of identifier based applications for multi-hop wireless ad hoc environment. The proposed system further provides backward compatibility to support co-existence with IP based applications. As a proof of concept, the architecture has been implemented on Linux platform with WiFi interfaces. Various practical scenarios with architectural insight are presented to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed approach.