Performance evaluation of three GPSR-based routing protocols in a military setting

Recent research has highlighted the potential of equipping soldiers with portable computing devices as a means to regularly report complex and important observations to mission planners at headquarters. To realise such scenarios connectivity between disparate elements in the battlefield needs to be established and appropriate supporting algorithms developed. In MANET literature several algorithms have been proposed to this effect for topologies where infrastructure is poor or non-available but not specifically for a military setting. In this work, we present a topology derived from a battalion deployment plan suitably parametrised to account for different personnel fill-up rates. In this setting we examine the performance of three position-based routing protocols, namely the Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) protocol and two optimisations; the Divisional Perimeter Routing (GPSR-DP), and Buffering Zone Greedy Forwarding Strategy (GPSR-BZGFS). Our results indicate that the default GPSR approach as well as the two optimisations do not perform adequately due to frequent network disconnections, which occur as a consequence of the large deployment area. We highlight the need for more research to discover a workable solution and discuss possible approaches to the issue.