Link-state routing protocol for multi-channel multi-interface wireless networks

A lot of military networks maintain multiple wireless channels and exploit frequency-hopping spread spectrum on those channels for anti-jamming. One drawback of using multichannel communications is the high overhead involved in broadcast operations: a transmitter should transmit a broadcast packet to all channels that are possibly occupied by a receiver. This makes certain broadcast-intensive mechanisms, such as, link-state routing difficult to implement. Link-state routing, however is faster and robust, which makes it suitable for military applications. In this paper, we present a link-state routing protocol tailored for multichannel networks by minimizing the broadcast overheads. This is achieved by means of a special set of nodes called cluster-heads. We have implemented our protocol on a multichannel, multiinterface wireless test bed and have compared its performance with an AODV-like reactive routing protocol, which is also tailored for multichannel multiinterface networks. The measurements on our test bed show that the proposed link-state routing protocol provides transient communications in a comparable or better performance.