Self Organized Terminode Routing

We consider the problem of routing in a wide area mobile ad-hoc network called Terminode Network. Routing in such a network is designed with the following objectives. Firstly, it should scale well in terms of the number of nodes and geographical coverage, secondly, routing should have scalable mechanisms that cope with the dynamicity in the network due to mobility, and thirdly nodes need to be highly collaborative and redundant, but, most of all, cannot use complex algorithms or protocols. Our routing scheme is a combination of two protocols called Terminode Local Routing (TLR) and Terminode Remote Routing TRR). TLR is used to route packets to close destinations. TRR is used to route to remote destinations and is composed of the following elements: Anchored Geodesic Packet Forwarding (AGPF), Friend Assisted Path Discovery (FAPD), multipath routing and path maintenance. The combination of TLR and TRR has the following features: (1) it is highly scalable because every node relies only on itself and a small number of other nodes for packet forwarding; (2) it acts and reacts well to the dynamicity of the network because multipath routing is considered as a rule; and (3) it can be implemented and run in very simple devices because the algorithms and protocols are very simple and based on high collaboration. We have performed simulations of the TLR and TRR protocols in GloMoSim. The simulation results demonstrate that the routing protocol is able to deliver over 80% of user data in a large, highly mobile simulation environment whereas Dynamic Source Routing(DSR) achieves less than 10%.