CeTUP: Controller-equipped Topology Update Process for Tactical Ad-hoc Networks

Abstract

Robust connectivity and sufficient bandwidth are not natural in most wireless network architectures. The increase of data rates that is mostly caused by multimedia traffic relying on QoS requirements complicates almost lossless delivery. Especially MANETs communications face these challenges, as nodes are moving at runtime. It is well known, that these network architectures have difficulties delivering time-critical data, since no central instance is in place. Bandwidth-demanding multimedia traffic easily causes stressed and overloaded network segments which result in bottlenecks and dropped packets. Introducing a SDN controller is a logical consequence to distribute traffic on nodes based on the knowledge of the entire topology. QoS requirements of all flows can be considered by the controller during routing. However, this brings up the question of how to keep the controller's topology up to date regarding lost and newly arisen connections since nodes are moving continuously. An outdated view of the topology results in deployed routes where no continuous connection between the nodes remains active. We therefore introduce CeTUP, a controller-equipped topology update process designed to provide an overview of the network as accurate as possible, before routing takes place by the controller. We show that this update process achieves QoS conform delivery rates even when nodes are moving at a speed of up to 60~km/h.