Plane-separated routing in ad-hoc networks

Doğanalp Ergenç,Ertan Onur

doi:10.1007/s11276-021-02824-7

Doğanalp Ergenç, Ertan Onur

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-021-02824-7

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Abstract

Control and user (data) plane separation (CUPS) is a concept applied in various networking areas to scale network resources independently, increase the quality of service, and facilitate the autonomy of networks. In this study, we leverage this concept to design a plane-separated routing algorithm, CUPS-based hierarchical routing algorithm (CHRA), as an energy-efficient and low-latency end-to-end communication scheme for clustered ad-hoc networks. In CHRA, while cluster heads constitute the control plane to conduct network discovery and routing, ordinary nodes residing in the user plane forward packets according to the routing decisions taken by the control plane. Exploiting the CUPS, we avoid exhausting cluster heads by offloading packet-forwarding to ordinary nodes and improve the quality of service by utilizing alternative paths other than the backbone of cluster heads. Our simulation results show that CHRA offers a better quality of service in terms of end-to-end latency and data-to-all ratio, and promotes fairness in energy-consumption in both stationary and mobile scenarios.

Highlights

Wireless communication has been deployed in a broad range of different networks with significantly varying requirements and conditions
Several routing protocols have been proposed to establish communication autonomously, they usually bring excessive control overhead and a significant energy consumption due to the costly network discovery, maintenance, and packet forwarding mechanisms that usually rely on the utilization of a limited set of nodes or flooding in a flat topology
We presented a plane-separated hierarchical routing algorithm, CUPS-based hierarchical routing algorithm (CHRA), in ad-hoc networks to address those problems

Summary

Introduction

Wireless communication has been deployed in a broad range of different networks with significantly varying requirements and conditions. While several systems like cellular mobile networks prioritize the maintenance of service quality for their customers as well as maximizing the profit, other systems such as tactical and emergency networks require reliability and adaptability in challenging environments. Such requirements have a direct impact on the networking architectures and design choices thereof. Military-tactical networks depend on self-organized communication of mobile nodes without any assistance of predeployed infrastructure that cannot be built on. The simulations are conducted in both mobile and stationary scenarios with uniformly and non-uniformly distributed topologies.

Results

Discussion

Conclusion