Routing over intermittent links for network centric warfare applications

In this paper, a routing strategy for Network Centric Warfare Applications is proposed. In Network Centric Warfare Applications, a Mobile Adhoc Wireless Network (MANET) is usually required to be setup on the fly between military nodes such as soldiers, armored vehicles, tanks and ships. Due to secrecy requirements, these applications mostly operate in data silence mode keeping the transmitted data as low as possible. In such applications, link stability and reliability take precedence over throughput. Thus in this paper we present a routing algorithm where some of the throughput is traded off for discovering more stable and reliable routes suitable for Network Centric Warfare operations. The proposed algorithm is compared with two of the most popular link stability based MANET protocols. An average 5 % improvement in routing overhead and packet delivery ratio with negligible loss in throughput is observed.