Project proposal: Implementation and evaluation of routing protocol

for infrastructured ad hoc networks

Responsible person: Anders Lindgren (dugdale@sm.luth.se)
January 7, 2004

Abstract some inherent problems of ad hoc networks. förklara

ISAIAH is a routing protocol for infrastructured ad hoc
networks. You should implement and test it.
Project overview
Project name: ISAIAH Implementation
Group size: 3-4 students
Primary supervisor: Anders Lindgren
E-mail: dugdale@sm.luth.se
ICQ: 9342088
Local supervisor: Kaustubh Phanse
E-mail: kphanse@sm.luth.se
1 Introduction
Ad hoc networking is an area of networking that has
received much attention in the research community
lately. An ad hoc network is a wireless network where
there is no fixed infrastructure, but instead all the wire- decide which route to choose. This causes routes that
less nodes jointly take part in the routing and for-
warding of messages through the network. A large
number of routing protocols have been proposed for
ad hoc networks[1], and one of the currently predom-
inant routing protocols is AODV[2, 3]. AODV is a so
called reactive routing protocol, meaning that it does
not maintain routes to all nodes in the network at all
times, but instead it discovers routes on demand as
they are needed.
vilka dessa är
One can note that among the nodes that can be
present in an ad hoc network, the capabilities of them
can greatly vary, and this causes them to be differ-
ently suitable for taking part in the routing and for-
warding of packets. Because of this, Lindgren and
Schelén proposed the concept of infrastructured ad hoc
networks[4]. In such a network, there exist some spe-
cial nodes (known as pseudo base stations, or PBSs)
that have the special properties of being highly pow-
ered (e.g. being plugged into a power outlet), and hav-
ing low mobility (preferrably being stationary). In an
infrastructured ad hoc networks, the main part of the
routing and forwarding should be handled by the PBSs,
relieving the mobile nodes of their duties. To handle
this, a special routing protocol is needed.
2.1 ISAIAH
To allow the operation of infrastructured ad hoc net-
works, Lindgren and Schelén designed ISAIAH[4], a
routing protocol based on AODV for routing in infras-
tructured ad hoc networks. The key feature of ISAIAH
is a modification of the cost function used in AODV to
go through mobile nodes to be more “expensive” than
routes that go through PBSs, thus causing the PBS
routes to be chosen.
Further, ISAIAH also includes a power saving mode
that allows mobile nodes to enter a sleep mode, turn-
ing off their wireless network interface, to save power.
This require some additional coordination to ensure
that packets are not lost as nodes in the sleep mode
are unable to send or receive any packets.

2 Infrastructured ad hoc net- 3 Task

working Your task in this project is to implement the ISAIAH
routing protocol and run some tests to evaluate your
Even though ad hoc networking is an interesting area implementation. Because of the fact that ISAIAH is
of research, it also has some problems, mainly in the based on AODV, and that there are only some mi-
field of actually applying it to real life scenarios due to nor modifications that must be made, it is suitable to

1
start with an existing AODV implementation and mod- 5 Deliverables
ify it to create an ISAIAH compliant implementation.
Your implementation should preferrably be based on This project should, apart from the source code of the
the AODV implementation from Uppsala University ISAIAH implementation, result in a report. This re-
(AODV-UU)1 that is known to be good. port should give a background to the problem, describe
You should implement ISAIAH according to the your implementation of ISAIAH, and your experimen-
specifications given in [4], but you are given a cer- tal setup and the results of your tests. Conclusions
tain degree of freedom, and if you during the course should be drawn from the conducted experiments. The
of the project see obvious improvements to the proto- report should be written according to good scientific
col specification, please document and implement these writing tradition in the style of a typical computer net-
as well (but also implement the original specification working conference paper.
to be able to evaluate the proposed additions and to
determine their benefit).
6 Possible continuations
3.1 Testing and evaluation of imple- If this project is successful, some of the project group
mentation members might be considered for a continuation in the
form of a master’s thesis project (exjobb).
When the protocol has been implemented, you should
run extensive tests to verify and evaluate it. To start
with, tests should be run to verify that your imple- 7 Supervision
mentation works according to the protocol specifica-
tion, and that the basic functionality such as chosing This project is proposed by Anders Lindgren and the
routes through PBSs is present. Further, tests should guidelines are set up by him. However, Anders will
be run to compare ISAIAH to AODV with respect to spend the spring term at UC Santa Barbara, and will
data delivery rates, end-to-end delays, routing proto- therefore not be physically present in Luleå during the
col overhead, and power consumption. Results from time of the project. Therefore, Kaustubh Phanse has
the tests should be presented in a easily understand- been assigned as an additional supervisor that will be
able form and should include statistical measures such present in Luleå for the duration of the project. He will
as confidence intervals to give the results validity. be able to assist in both more practical day-to-day is-
Unfortunately, it is likely that the amount of tests sues as well as in technical questions, while Anders will
possible to perform and the scale of them will be lim- be available through e-mail (and expects to get regular
ited by the amount of hardware (computers with wire- reports on the progress of the project) to answer tech-
less LAN cards) available and the number of people nical questions (and any other question as well that is
you can enroll to run around with the mobile nodes. possible to handle through e-mail).
It is expected that the project group have weekly
project meetings where the work of the past week is
3.2 Power saving mode summarized, new goals for the next week is set up,
Because it might be hard to actually be able to control and newly arised issues are addressed. A summary of
the wireless interface in the required manner for the each such meeting should be sent to the supervisors.
power saving mode to be accurately implemented (and Additionally, bi-weekly meetings should be held with
in any way it is hard to measure the power consumption Kaustubh to discuss the progress and direction of the
for the evaluation), you might have to apply some trick project.
for that. If you are able to implement a “real” power
saving mode, it is great, but it is also acceptable if
you only implement a “virtual” power saving mode as
References
described below. beskriv detta [1] Elizabeth M. Royer and Chai-Keong Toh. A re-
view of current routing protocols for ad hoc mobile
wireless networks. IEEE Personal Communications
4 Equipment requirements Magazine, 6(2):46–55, April 1999.
• At least 2 laptops with 802.11 cards (?) [2] Charles Perkins and Elizabeth Royer. Ad hoc on
demand distance vector routing. In Proceedings
• Stationary machines with 802.11 interfaces as
of the 2nd IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing
PBSs
Systems and Applications, pages 90–100, February
1 available from http://user.it.uu.se/~
henrikl/aodv/ 1999.

2
[3] Charles Perkins, Elizabeth Belding-Royer, and
Samir Das. Ad hoc on-demand distance vector
(AODV) routing. IETF RFC3561 – Experimental
Standard, July 2003.
[4] Anders Lindgren and Olov Schelén. Infrastruc-
tured ad hoc networks. In Proceedings of the
2002 International Conference on Parallel Process-
ing Workshops (International Workshop on Ad Hoc
Networking (IWAHN 2002)), pages 64–70, August
2002.