Integrating DTN and MANET Routing

Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) routing protocols aim at establishing end-to-end paths between communicating nodes and thus support end-to-end semantics of existing transports and applications. In contrast, DTN-based communication schemes imply asynchronous communication (and thus often require new applications) but achieve better reachability, particularly in sparsely populated environments. In this paper, we suggest a hybrid scheme that combines AODV and DTN-based routing and allows keeping the AODV advantage of maintaining end-to-end semantics whenever possible while, at the same time, also offering DTN-based communication options whenever available - leaving the choice to the application. We present our protocol and system design, particularly including the interaction of AODV and DTN, demonstrate achievable performance gains based upon measurements, and report on initial experiments with our implementation in an emulation environment.