Interconnecting Heterogeneous MANET Networks at the Tactical Edge

Abstract

The proliferation of different types of tactical waveforms within a theater of operations drives the need to interconnect these disparate Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) to enable increased connectivity and robust communications services to the war fighters. The interconnection of these heterogeneous wireless networks requires a scalable routing architecture that can support the frequent topological changes in a tactical environment. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is considered the de facto standard inter-domain routing protocol, but its original design for wired networks, poses challenges for mobile networks. In this paper, we propose a novel routing layer architecture that applies commercial virtual router concepts to BGP in order to seamlessly connect heterogeneous networks even in the presence of mobility. We performed OPNET simulations and compared our proposed routing architecture against three other routing architectures including flat OSPF, OSPF with areas and plain BGP under various mobility models and link blockage scenarios. We show that our architecture heals network splits, provides a scalable approach and enables support of routing policy requirements dictated by the various underlying networks. The control plane overhead required by this architecture is significantly less than a Flat OSPF architecture.