Policy-based routing for Flying Adhoc Networks

What is it about?

Strategic and profile-based communication in wireless adhoc networks is complex since it is important to distinguish between different traffic types and their routes to ensure the required performance over a dynamic network. In order to face this challenge, we developed a new concept of a policy-based routing protocol for flying adhoc networks, having the Babel routing protocol as a starting point. Policies are identified based on the Type-of Service field, allowing the augmented Babel protocol to select routes based on the properties of different types of traffic. Our approach differentiates route costs per traffic profile to consider different requirements in the route selection process. The evaluation shows that applying our approach improves traffic-specific performance; namely, tail-latency in video traffic can be significantly improved by one order of magnitude.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Managing strategic wireless adhoc communications between moving vehicles while fulfilling the requirements of different types of traffic is difficult since different flows have different requirements, such as low latency or high throughput, resulting in a challenging task to route the traffic. To face this challenge, we propose a new policy-based routing protocol for FANETs, based on the Babel protocol, together with the usage of Type-of Service tags to distinguish between different policies while using delay as a metric to implement policies in each link. Using the proposed concept offers advantages over the current Babel protocol and other routing algorithms, namely: custom profiles can be defined; both wireless and wired networks are supported; additional metrics and cost estimation algorithms can be added on a per-profile basis. Evaluation results show significant performance improvements for different policies depending on the settings emulated in Mininet WiFi, such as reducing the tail-latency for video traffic to 1 s with less than linear scaling of routing table entries and routing traffic towards the number of policies.