Towards Interoperability of Adaptive Social-Aware Routing at the Tactical Edge

In military operations at the tactical edge, mobile networking systems are crucial for war fighters to ensure rapid situational response to the surrounding environments. Traditional routing protocols for tactical mobile networking systems assume end-to-end wireless connectivity among war fighters, but may experience serious performance degradation in practical Disconnected, Intermittent, and Limited-bandwidth (DIL) environments where such network connectivity is usually unavailable. Node mobility is instead exploited to ensure efficient data delivery following the methodology of "carry-and-forward", in particular, by investigating the information about social relationship between war fighters. It is hence important to maintain the interoperability between the carry-and-forward routing schemes and traditional Link State Routing (LSR) protocols, so as to improve the communication efficiency without incurring significant upgrade cost. Such interoperability will also improve the data delivery performance and network scalability by addressing the unavailability of routing paths in LSR protocols, without requiring global network information. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to maintaining such interoperability by investigating the diverse wireless connectivity among mobile nodes that varies over time. Our basic idea is to opportunistically enable LSR whenever temporary multi-hop connectivity exist between nodes, and to further integrate the locally maintained network link states into the calculation of social-aware routing metrics among disconnected nodes. Extensive simulation results show that our scheme could significantly improve the routing performance in various network scenarios.