Opportunistic routing in tactical networks

Providing network functionality for military VHF tactical networks has been problematic for many years. Existing schemes have struggled to provide multi-hop transmission of combined voice and data traffic in this dynamic and very low bandwidth environment. Research has shown that the overhead introduced by existing MANET routing techniques can swamp tactical networks of non-trivial size and topological complexity. In this paper we propose the use of a cross-layered approach combined with opportunistic routing to provide enhanced opportunistic routing (EOR) in mobile tactical networks. This technique makes per-packet forwarding decisions based only on preset domain knowledge, information from lower layers, and information from each individual packet. Because this technique does not build or maintain any network topology state it can operate with no network layer overhead. EOR has been simulated in Qualnet and compared to both AODV and OLSRv2 in large and small tactical networks. EOR was found to be superior to both AODV and OLSRv2 in terms of packet delivery, delay, and network overhead.