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October 18, 2003
Presentation: AODV
I had an opportunity to hear Charles Perkins discuss his thoughts and research on implementing mobile AdHoc networks (manet for short). Unfortunately, I believe most of the interesting details within his talk were missed due to time constraints (he blasted through about 20-30 slides). As such this will more than likely be an extremely lame write up about the discussion, which as a whole was rather interesting.
To begin with, mobile networks have a major challenge that includes link stability. Thanks to the nature of mobile devices, you can't completely depend upon the same route all the time to send your traffic. Further more, because these devices (mobile phones in this case) have a limited battery life, you cannot use many of the standard means of identifying a valid next node (broadcast, etc). The recent push has been to create a distance vector routing protocol better known as RFC 3561, or AODV. There are currently a couple candidates in contention to be the recommended protocol, but we only got to hear about one of them (unfortunately).
Some interesting challenges were brought up, mostly those unseen. For example, to test these networks, the simulation tools originally used would not work. After many hours of hacking on another simulator, they were able to simulate a 10,000 node network. The next step is a 100,000 node network as I understand it. The idea of inserting a base station to the network, and shown how it alters the network functionality/topology.
Posted by Dan at October 18, 2003 04:35 PM