Utilizing the broadcast medium while maintaining per-link information: A practical approach

Military systems are often constrained systems that require per link information to effectively institute QoS policies, route packets, provide topology management, and tunnel application data. Point-to-point over Ethernet (PPPoE) RFC4938/55781 describes a standard radio-to-router interface to provide link information from the radio to the router to enhance routing decisions. Although PPPoE RFC4938/5578 works effectively for directional radios that form point-to-point links, omni-directional radios using this technique incur additional overhead as multicast or broadcast packets are replicated over each PPP tunnel. In this paper, we describe a method to maintain per-link radio information in a standard way, while more effectively utilizing the broadcast medium of omnidirectional radios.²