Ferry-assisted greedy perimeter stateless routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (FA-GPSR)

In modern warfare combatants may be equipped with computing devices to report on changes in the battlefield situation and communicate important observations to operational planners and commanders on the field. To reach such a vision by connect all the loosely coupled scenario elements, it is important to support and develop effective routing algorithms operating in a MANET environment, which are a natural fit for military purposes. Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) is a well known routing algorithm in MANETs that does not need to maintain a routing table and performs well in a free open space scenario with regularly distributed nodes. In this work we show that GPSR does not perform adequately in military-scenarios due to frequent network disconnections, which occur as a consequence of the large, battalion-sized, deployment area. We have shown in previous work that this problem extends to existing proposed optimisations and have suggested that a new approach is needed. In this paper we propose a novel optimisation to GPSR targeted at battalion level topologies that includes techniques drawn from delay-tolerant network research to enhance performance by using knowledge derived from the application itself and the topology. We demonstrate the advantages of the new technique, termed FA-GPSR, against both vanilla GPSR and two of its optimisations and outline the trade-offs involved.