Experimental evaluation of LANMAR, a scalable ad-hoc routing protocol

Routing protocols for mobile ad-hoc networks have been evaluated extensively through simulation because various network conditions can be easily configured, tested, and replicated across different schemes in simulation than in a real system. Recently, some of these schemes have been implemented in academic, industry and defense testbeds. This gives researchers an opportunity to validate their simulation results with actual implementations. In this paper we report the lessons learned from the implementation of LANMAR (Pei et al. (2000)), a scalable routing protocol that was developed at UCLA as part of large-scale ad hoc network architecture for autonomous unattended agents under ONR support. LANMAR is designed to provide efficient, scalable routing in large ad-hoc wireless networks that exhibit group mobility. In this paper we describe the implementation of this protocol in Linux environments and report on experimental results based on this implementation. The results and lessons from these experiments have enriched our understanding of the LANMAR protocol and its interaction with the other layers and the environment, paving the way to protocol refinements and more efficient implementations.