A Routing Protocol for Utilizing Code Resources in Tactical Ad Hoc Networks with a Single Transceiver

A tactical ad hoc network is usually divided into several subnets by Code Division Multiple Access with frequency hopping sequences. In practice, the number of subnets needed in common tactical task is much lower than the theoretical networking capacity, which causes serious code resource waste. To make full use of idle code resources, we present a single-transceiver multi-channel routing protocol based on MCRP, named virtual dual-channel routing protocol (VDCRP). To overcome the disadvantages of serious overhead and high end-to-end delay of MCRP caused by employing multi-channel broadcast mechanism in multi-channel network environment, this proposed protocol provides a single-channel split-phase broadcast mechanism (SCSP) and a new metric called virtual dual-channel metric (VDCM). SCSP consists of control channel and data channel, which divides time frame into negotiation phase and data phase. In negotiation phase, all nodes exchange routing packets on the control channel. In data phase, all communication node pairs transmit and receive data packets on the data channel. We design the metric VDCM by considering both inter-flow interference and channel switching cost. Our simulation results show that compared to MCRP, VDCRP has higher resource utilization efficiency and lower ETE delay in multi-channel environment. Key-Words:virtual dual-channel networking scheme; code division multiple access; broadcast mechanism; routing metric; split phase; network throughput; average end-to-end delay