Abstract:
Rapid advancements in wireless technologies have fuelled parallel research in
two areas, one in which wireless devices use a central authority to establish
and maintain the network and one in which no such central authority is used.
Mobile Ad-Hoc networks (MANETs) are part of the latter research. Most
researchers define a mobile Ad Hoc network as "a self-organizing network
formed on the fly without the aid of any established infrastructure or central
authority".
Many routing protocols have been developed to establish and maintain routes
in MANETs. They try to address the unique challenges that MANETs present
over traditional wired networks. Some of these challenges are use of unreliable
wireless medium for communication and lack of a central authority to
facilitate any communication in the network. These protocols find a route to a
destination if such a route exists. However, in the wireless medium, there are
quite a few options that have not been explored. For example, no
implementation has been focused to address the possibility of using VHF for
Ad Hoc networks.
In general, all the routing protocols can be used for communication over every
kind of wireless link. However, in this project we have presented an approach
to implement a new routing protocol for application specific to a VHF device
and a MAC protocol to match the requirements of the routing protocol in the
given scenario. Our protocol uses the concept of MPR nodes as taken from
OLSR to act as the local routing heads to reduce congestion of network due to
control messages and for better utilization of bandwidth and other network
resources. This report describes the protocol in detail and provides a
simulation-based evaluation of its performance compared to other possible
schemes and the optimal scheme.
