Manetkit: A Framework for MANET Routing Protocols

Research in MANETs has resulted in the development of numerous and diverse routing protocols. We argue in this paper that this diversity is inherent to the MANET domain and therefore it will be important in future environments to simultaneously support multiple MANET protocols. On this basis, we propose a highly configurable component framework that facilitates the support of multiple MANET protocols and accommodates pluggable protocol functionality. Importantly, the framework also allows protocols to be composed, decomposed and hybridised in a variety of ways to create value-added functionality. In addition, it has coherent support for dynamic reconfiguration which opens the possibility for protocol hybridisation strategies to be safely executed at run-time. The paper outlines the functionality of the framework, illustrates its configurability, and offers a preliminary performance evaluation that demonstrates acceptable overhead.