An Ad Hoc Network for the Communication Infrastructure in Pastureland

Abstract

People and businesses in today's world have been becoming dependent on universal communication services and the Internet more and more. Remote rural areas of Mongolia are not exception. This paper presents a pastureland ad hoc network to provide low cost communication services to those rural areas. The pastureland network serves two types of different user's areas which are categorized by node density and mobility of users; one is small settlement (Soum area) and the other is open areas settled by nomadic herders (Pastureland). Two main services - internet access and voice service are considered to be used. Each of them requires different destination patterns and session generation rate. Therefore, if either proactive or reactive routing is applied in pastureland network they will cause high control overhead. To overcome this advantage, we propose a hybrid routing method optimized to conditions of such a network. This hybrid method implements proactive routing to proxy nodes and depending on destination distance, it routes voice traffic through reactive path or hierarchical path. For selection of the hierarchical path and reactive path, SIP signaling is used. General analysis shows that our hybrid routing method has lower control overhead than the reactive routing in pastureland network environment.