MANETKit: supporting the dynamic deployment and reconfiguration of ad-hoc routing protocols

The innate dynamicity and complexity of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) has resulted in numerous ad-hoc routing protocols being proposed. Furthermore, numerous variants and hybrids continue to be reported in the literature. This diversity appears to be inherent to the field---it seems unlikely that there will ever be a 'one-size-fits-all' solution to the ad-hoc routing problem. However, typical deployment environments for ad-hoc routing protocols still force the choice of a single fixed protocol; and the resultant compromise can easily lead to sub-optimal performance, depending on current operating conditions. In this paper we address this problem by exploring a framework approach to the construction and deployment of ad-hoc routing protocols. Our framework supports the simultaneous deployment of multiple protocols so that MANET nodes can switch protocols to optimise to current operating conditions. The framework also supports finer-grained dynamic reconfiguration in terms of protocol variation and hybridisation. We evaluate our framework by using it to construct and (simultaneously) deploy two popular ad-hoc routing protocols (DYMO and OLSR), and also to derive fine-grained variants of these. We measure the performance and resource overhead of these implementations compared to monolithic ones, and find the comparison to be favourable to our approach.