Beacon-based routing for tactical networks

The U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD) warfighter is reliant upon the development of a reliable, resilient communications capability under harsh, battlefield environments. Due to high mobilities and the nature of the various terrains, the dynamics of the communications links is extremely erratic and rapidly changing. This results in extreme strain on the performance of routing protocols attempting to find and maintain viable communications paths. In this paper we discuss and analyze a new class of routing protocols which we refer to as Beacon-Based Routing protocols. Beacon-Based Routing protocols proactively build a small number of, typically one or two, spanning trees in the network and use these trees to discover paths on demand. The existence of one (or more) spanning tree(s) ensures full network connectivity and hence can be used to find network paths without the need for network-wide broadcast of discovery messages, as in other on-demand routing protocols. This class of routing protocols represents the generalization of the Pulse Protocol [1], originally developed in 2002 for applications to Internet access networks. The performance of the Pulse Protocol was analyzed in [1] and M in various applications including general Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) and in sensor networks. As we discuss in this paper, the Beacon-Based Routing protocol class has optimal behavior with respect to the communications overhead required to run the protocol. As such, its scaling behavior is superior to other existing routing protocol classes when assessed in the context of a MANET. Further, the performance of the protocol is discussed in the specific context of traffic flows within battlefield scenarios. We show how the protocol can be design to be traffic-aware and how this further improves the scalability of the routing overhead for tactical MANET scenarios.