MeDeHa – Message Delivery
in Heterogeneous Disruption-prone Networks
Rao Naveed Bin Rais (Planete, INRIA Sophia
Antipolis, France)
Marc Mendonca (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA)
Thierry Turletti (Planete, INRIA Sophia
Antipolis, France)
Katia Obraczka (University of California,
Santa Cruz, USA)
MeDeHa (Message Delivery
in Heterogeneous Disruption-prone Networks) is a message delivery framework
that incorporates node and network heterogeneity and tries to make use of it
whenever possible. The framework offers the following advantages:
¨
Seamless message delivery
across heterogeneous networks.
¨
Ability to run at
different layers of the protocol stack.
¨
Bridging
infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less networks.
¨
Ability to work with
existing MANET routing protocols without modifying them.
¨
Ability to work with
existing DTN routing protocols.
¨
Partition mending through multihop ad-hoc (MANET) transit networks.
The framework
design is based on the principle that in order to join two networks, there must
be a node that understands the traffic on both networks and acts as a gateway
to pass the traffic. In MeDeHa, any node can serve as
the gateway node, as long as it has multiple interfaces (e.g., Wifi and 3G on a cellular/smart phone) or it is able to
switch frequencies in order to use the same interface card to connect to
different networks
A notification
protocol has been designed in MeDeHa to work both in
infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less networks, which plays a key role
in seamless message delivery across multiple heterogeneous interconnected
networks, and also enables the integration of existing MANET routing protocols
in the framework. This notification protocol performs this functionality
through neighborhood information exchange across all
networks including infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less networks. Using
the information obtained from neighborhood
information exchange, the nodes are able to build their routing and contact
tables. The routing tables are used for nodes that are directly accessible,
while the contact tables are used to manage heuristics about nodes (e.g.,
number of encounters) that are used in relay node selection.
We implemented the MeDeHa framework on NS-3 and OMNET++ Simulators, and
conducted extensive simulations using quite a few realistic scenarios having
realistic synthetic and real mobility traces. We also implemented the framework
as a user-space daemon in Linux and conducted experiments on a real testbed. To validate the simulation results, we also
performed some hybrid experiments, in which part of the experiment ran on NS-3
simulator and part of the experiment executed on real machines.
The NS-3 and
OMNET++ codes can be downloaded from the links below. The OMNET++
implementation (compatible with version INET-20061020) only involves
infrastructure-based networks with disruption tolerance, while the NS-3
implementation (compatible with version 3.5) is the most recent and comprises
of both infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less networks including MANETs.
Modified Version of INET Framework (OMNET++) (click here to download)
INET Simulation Scripts (click here to download)
NS-3 MeDeHa Implementation with Scripts (click here to download)