On The Implementation and Experiences of A MIL-STD-188-220C Ad Hoc Routing Protocol

Abstract

MIL-STD-188-220C defines a routing protocol to achieve the unicast and multicast capabilities for a multihop ad hoc network. In order to achieve these capabilities, a topology update and a source directly relay modules are defined for the routing protocol. In this paper, we implement this routing protocol over the 802.11b testbed and evaluate its system performance. During the implementation, several technical issues are discovered and the corresponding solutions are proposed to realize this routing protocol. In the topology update module, a topology update algorithm is implemented. This algorithm solves the assumption issue of this protocol in the standard and can compute the topology table with two shortest paths correctly. In the source directly module, a common path selection algorithm is proposed and implemented. This algorithm is used to select the common shortest paths from a source node to multiple destinations and saves wireless bandwidth to deliver packets. Furthermore, the system throughput performance is measured to demonstrate that both modules and their algorithms can operate correctly. Finally, the performance results also show that our routing protocol over the testbed is feasible for both unicast and multicast applications of multihop as well as mobile ad hoc networks.