Design and Implementation of the Extended Routing Information Protocol for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks in Linux

Master's Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Computer Science - Software, Coventry University (MSRSAS - computer science and networking), course: Design and Implementation of the Extended Routing Information Protocol[ERIP] for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks in Linux, language: English, abstract: A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a network that can be established with no fixed infrastructure. This means that all its nodes behave as routers and take part in its discovery and maintenance of routes to other nodes in the network. Its routing protocol has to be able to cope with the new challenges that a MANET creates such as node mobility, security maintenance, quality of service, limited bandwidth and limited power supply. These challenges set new demands on MANET routing protocols, like low overhead operation, routing security and best path selection. This Thesis deals with the design and implementation of the Extended Routing Information Protocol (ERIP) for mobile ad-hoc networks in Linux. ERIP is a proactive protocol, characterized by low overhead operation, best path selection based on hop count, loop free working and routing security. Raw sockets are used for exchange of routing information, whereas data exchange happens via TCP or UDP sockets as required by the application. Low overhead operation of ERIP is guaranteed by using the incremental dump strategy. Incremental dumping of the routing table is realized by scheduling only partial updates, instead of full. The routing table is encrypted before broadcast using a simple shared key algorithm to provide routing security. The routing functionality of the implemented protocol is tested by first running ERIP on two laptops and using VLC media player to stream multimedia data between the laptops. The two laptops were then moved out of range of each other and intermediate nodes (laptops) were brought in that were running the same routing protocol. The data was communicated over multiple hops in near real time. The best path selection property was proved by setting up a network of ERIP nodes that had multiple paths between source and destination with different hop counts. The implemented protocol consistently routed data through the path that had the least hop count. Porting the developed protocol to the Linux kernel would allow it be part of the standard Linux distribution. Also, more complex cryptography algorithms can be implemented to provide data and routing security.