Microsoft Research Project 

Topic

Implementation of Cluster Based Ad hoc Network Routing Protocol in Windows CE.NET

Guides

Professor Gautam Barua,
Director,
Indian Institute Of Technology Guwahati

Duration

August 2003 – May 2004

Ad hoc networks, which have seen drastic increase in their usage scenarios and convergence of different applications' traffic lately, are getting ready to support QoS and secure traffic. Additional challenges in ad hoc networks are attributed to mobility of intermediate nodes, absence of routing infrastructure and, low bandwidth and computational capacity of the nodes. The proposed protocol is a cluster based, source routing protocol, effectively uses clustering to minimize the routing overhead and to provide QoS guarantees.

The protocol has the following components:

• Initial Clustering
• Cluster Management
• Route Discovery, Establishment, and Maintenance

All these functions were incorporated into the WinCE kernel. The strategy will be to implement the functionality through a user process first where the routing table used by the IP code in the TCP stack will be updated through suitable system calls. Packets destined for this system will be sent as IP packets on a predefined port so that they can be sent to the user daemon. In the second stage, the implementation was moved into the kernel. This will allow “raw”, MAC layer packets to be used and for broadcasting to be implemented easily using the under lying MAC layer.

In the first phase of the project, the protocol was implemented as a user level application using Winsock 2.2 provided by Windows CE.NET. The protocol was tested on a test bed of 10 PCs (all PCs running CRESQ on a hardware emulator provided by Windows CE.NET).  We varied the mobility scenarios and accordingly measured the performance of the protocol in terms of packet loss ratio as well as routing overhead (defined as the number of extra packets sent by the protocol per data packet). The results also reflected the near optimum values for certain parameters like max hop count, timeout interval.

In the next phase, the protocol was implemented as an Intermediate Device Driver, which is similar to a virtual device driver placed between the protocol driver for TCP/IP and the physical layer Ethernet driver. Such a device driver can be easily incorporated into the modular structure of windows CE and the third party users can be oblivious of the existence of such a device driver.