Routing Designs for Tactical Heterogeneous Cooperative Broadcast Networks

In military units the size of a brigade or a battalion, several radio networks are often needed to be interconnected into a heterogeneous network. These interconnections can be designed in many different ways.In this paper, methods improving the efficiency of OLSR routing at layer 3 for interconnecting heterogeneous networks are proposed. The proposed methods keep the overhead generated by the OLSR control traffic low, while at the same time maintaining a high packet delivery ratio. The investigated heterogeneous network consists of wideband company networks and an interconnecting mediumband network. The waveforms used in the networks were based on synchronized cooperative broadcasting (SCB). In order for SCB to be able to deliver topology information to the layer 3 router, a neighbourhood discovery procedure was developed and integrated with SCB.The results showed that efficiency was improved considerably by introducing the proposed OLSR modifications. The most effective solution required access to topology information from layer 2. However, even without access to layer 2 information a reasonably effective solution was obtained.