Comparison of Inter-MANET routing protocol evaluation tools

Nowadays, thanks to the increasing technologies, soldiers and vehicles are equiped with wireless technology to communicate on the battlefield. They form adhoc network and particularly Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET). Since the battlefield is organized as a coalition, we are in front of a situation where several groups (nations mainly) want to connect to others and establish interMANET communication. Inter-MANET (or interdomainMANET) communication should allow exchange, but maintain a supervision on the exchanged information. Several protocols have been designed in order to handle inter-domain routing for tactical MANETs. In this article, we describe these protocols and focus on the general issues they solve. Then, we compare the results of a simulator (NS3), an emulator (CORE) and a real platform (laptops) on simple network characteristics on Network and Data Link layers. We highlight behavioral differences between the three candidates and particularly softwares (NS3 and CORE). They create problems that do not exist in reality. Consequently, most existing protocols proposed in the litterature are more complex than they should be. Based on this comparison, we propose some guidelines to design Inter-domain routing protocols for MANET.