An Airborne Ad-hoc Network Routeing Protocol Using Nodes’ Mobility Information

With the new generation Fighters, AWACS, UAVs and other advanced military weapons systems equipped, to build a high-speed, high-capacity, broadband and dynamic airborne networks has a significance to improve the capability of information sharing and cooperative engagement for each battle platform. Using MANETs technology to build the Airborne Ad-hoc Network which is used to connect airborne platforms together is becoming a hotspot. The study about Airborne Ad-hoc Network is facing a variety of technical problems because of rapid movement of nodes,dynamic topology, far distance between nodes and unreliable communication link. The routing protocol which is used in the Airborne Ad-hoc Networks is studied. The main content includes following aspects:First, the Airborne Ad-hoc Networks has a highly dynamic topology, and the traditional Ad Hoc routing protocols can not satisfy the requirements of packet delivery ratio, control overhead and low latency. A routing protocol(MARP / MDP) using the planned mobility information to improve the performance of network is studied. The protocol uses nodes’ mobility information to predict the changes of topology which enhances the adaptability to dynamic topology and reduces routing overhead. According to the core of the protocol, the topology prediction mechanism, the actual topology detection mechanism, differences notification mechanism, the route calculation method and data structures of the protocol are designed. What’s more, a broadcast storm reducing mechanism which uses known topology information is proposed.Second, the performance of MARP / MDP,AODV,OLSR and LAR routing protocol are analyzed. The results show that, the MARP/MDP protocol’s performance is improved by broadcast storm reducing mechanism, and is better than other three protocols. MARP / MDP protocol can adapt to the dynamic network topology. In the case that the network topology changes dynamically, the protocol can also maintain a high packet delivery rate and low average end to end delay. With the increasing of network traffics, MARP/MDP ’s packet loss ratio and routing overhead is not increased much. The protocol also maintains good performance in the non-ideal communication environment.Third, an implementation of MARP/MDP routing protocols in the Linux operating system is introduced. A development and testing platform is built to test the function of the protocol. When the node forwards packet, it uses the forecasting routing topology table at first. Once the actual topology and the predicted topology are different, all nodes can rebuild the topology and calculate the effective and reliable routing. The Experimental results show that the implementation is correct.