Adaptive out-of-band routing protocol auto-negotiation for mobile ad hoc networks

There is no universal approach for the routing problem in mobile ad hoc networks: Depending on mobility or data traffic patterns, resource constraints, environmental conditions or delivery requirements in terms of reliability, latencies or available bandwidth, protocol designs and optimizations focus on different aspects. Changes in the usage context have an effect on the suitability or efficiency of the utilized routing protocol, such that switching to another protocol intended to work in the altered environment might be desired. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically configure and adaptively switch between routing protocols at runtime by coordinating local preferences using a fault-tolerant distributed voting algorithm. It has been implemented as an extension to a routing software running on Linux and Unix-like systems.