Time-sensitive Multi-Flow Routing in Highly Utilized MANETs

Abstract

MANETs comprise several mobile nodes, wirelessly connected with each other. These networks are self-organized, each participant is responsible for routing and data forwarding. Routing protocols only provide local or outdated topology knowledge because participants are moving continuously. Also, transmission capacities are limited which often results in over-utilized network segments. Capacity conform path distribution is challenging since nodes route based on their incomplete topology knowledge. Recent work showed that an up-to-date and complete network topology representation can quickly be delivered to a controller, which is instantiated on an arbitrary node. Now, routing and path deployment can be outsourced to the controller. With this knowledge, we introduce several path finding approaches to answer the question if and to which extent non over-utilizing routes for several flows can be found where common MANET routing techniques would fail. Also, paths have to be computed quickly since topologies change due to the mobility of nodes. Our path finding techniques also focus on routes aiming for long connection lifetime. We compare our approaches regarding capacity usage, computation times, and connection lifetimes, taking into consideration typical MANET behavior.