VLSI design of stability routing protocol for sensors in MANETs

Mobile hosts and wireless networking hardware are becoming more widely available. Data transmission between the nodes becomes more critical while considering the sensors in an ad-hoc network due to the unpredictable and variable mobility patterns of the nodes. The signal strength criteria that has been proved to be efficient for communication without any data loss between the mobile nodes is considered. A stability routing protocol (R. Dube et al., 1997; S. Xu et al., 2000) has been proposed for ad-hoc networks and is based on the signal strength and location stability. We present the architecture of the chip that can be used for communication between the surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors (Alfred Pohl, 2000) in an ad-hoc network. The architecture of the chip is divided into four main blocks, namely update and transmitter unit (UTx), routing table generation unit (RTU), packet forwarding and updating unit (PFU) and receiver unit (RU). All these blocks use a centralized memory unit to access the data and are linked to a bus arbitrator. The memory unit has four lookup tables - position LUT, stability LUT, routing LUT, emergency LUT. A VHDL model was developed and simulated using the IEEE standard packages.