Improving Routing with Up-to-date and Full Topology Knowledge in MANETs

Robust and reliable routing decisions are enablers to minimize redundancy and to optimize throughput. This might be nice to have in non-time critical transmissions but required in QoS related data delivery, like VoIP and video calls. MANETs, are error-prone considering their wireless and mobile nature. Relying on an up-to-date and complete topology overview makes routing easier and more efficient and also facilitates mentioned routing goals. MANETs must consider interference if routing follows Ford-Fulkerson's objective to compute maximum throughput. However, preconditions must be met before one optimizes flow distributions. Such major precondition in the field of MANETs is an algorithm that constructs a graph equal to the actual MANET topology. This graph must be complete and almost instant in terms of connections and construction to guarantee that each node's position does not deviate from its actual. We centralize the routing, inspired by SDN advancements, to a controller that obtains the topology by triggering an algorithm, called RFTKR. Nodes assemble a tree, having the controller as their root while gathering neighborhood information. Afterwards, they convey their adjacent lists towards the controller. We present a proof-of-concept evaluation with microcontrollers and discuss the scalability of RFTKR with an extensive simulation.