Mass Configuration with Confirmation in Tactical Networks

In this paper we present the design and evaluation of efficient and reliable confirmation-based mass configuration protocols (cMCONF) for wireless Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). Confirmation based MCONF - proposed as MCONF-Mode B in our earlier work - enables mass configuration changes in a MANET while obtaining feedback information from nodes using a classic flooding approach. In this paper, we propose and evaluate three versions of cMCONF that collect feedback information from the network (confirmation of successful configuration change) more efficiently than classic flooding: (a) multi-parent Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) based cMCONF (m-DODAG-cMCONF), (b) single-parent DODAG based cMCONF (s-DODAG-cMCONF) and (c) Unicast based cMCONF. The proposed protocols improve the efficiency and reliability performance of the confirmation process of MCONF-Mode B operation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed protocols in terms of reliability and message redundancy by emulating MANETs on Common Open Research Emulator (CORE). From these emulations, we observe that m-DODAG-cMCONF provides an excellent tradeoff between reliability and message complexity across different network sizes and mobility scenarios.