System Services for Ad-Hoc Routing: Architecture, Implementation and Experiences

This work explores several system issues regarding the design and implementation of routing protocols for ad-hoc wireless networks. We examine the routing architecture in current operating systems and find it insufficient on several counts, especially for supporting on-demand or reactive routing protocols. Examples include lack of mechanisms for queuing outstanding packets awaiting route discovery and mechanisms for communicating route usage information from kernel to userspace. We propose an architecture and a generic API for any operating system to augment the current routing architecture. Implementing the API may normally require kernel modifications, but we provide an implementation for Linux using only the standard Linux 2.4 kernel facilities. The API is provided as a shared user-space library called the Ad-hoc Support Library (ASL), which uses a small loadable kernel module. To prove the viability of our framework, we provide a full-fledged implementation of the AODV protocol using ASL, and a design for the DSR protocol. Through this study, we also reinforce our belief that it is profoundly important to consider system issues in ad-hoc routing protocol design.

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