A Tiered Geocast Protocol for Long Range Mobile Ad Hoc Networking

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) enables novel applications in situations and venues that do not lend themselves to traditional networking, such as deployed military training, first responder communications at disaster sites, and even tactical military and police communications. In a MANET, mobile nodes relay each others´ packets instead of each having to send its traffic through an infrastructure point. This relaying, however, can result in unacceptable latency and connectivity gaps when the area of operations is large. Geocast is a network protocol that replaces IP addressing: a packet is delivered to all nodes occupying a designated geocast region. However, geocast over large areas can suffer from the problems mentioned above when implemented in a flat network. This paper describes a new tiered geocast protocol that combines a novel mix of geocast heuristics for controlling transmissions with decision rules for bridging packets onto a long range subnetwork for long haul transport. This paper describes the tiered geocast algorithm, the design insights necessary to implement it in the real world, and an extensive simulation study of the protocol supporting two applications from the one tactical engagement simulation system (OneTESS) military training system