Meghadoot

- A Hybrid Wireless architecture

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Overview of the Project

The project involves implementing a network architecture (Meghadoot) for wireless networks and the routing protocol in kernel space. The network architecture, which is named Meghadoot^1.1, tries to reduce the overhead in a Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) by introducing an Infrastructure Node (IN). The presence of an IN prevents unnecessary flooding of route requests (control traffic) as the IN maintains complete network topology. However, a large number of nodes would lead to tremendous control traffic due to beaconing, which is performed in order to generate network topology. Hence, the concept of an Ad hoc Zone (AZ) is introduced in Meghadoot, wherein nodes are not tied to any IN. The region that is fully in the control of an IN is called the Control Zone (CZ).

The routing protocol for this architecture is called the Infrastructure Based Ad hoc Routing (IBAR). The routing protocol also defines the messages that are to be exchanged between nodes for IN advertisement, registration, and exchange of topology information. The routing protocol also defines a form of Mobile IP to enable nodes to move from one IN to another.

The project involved the implementation of IBAR for CZ of Meghadoot at the kernel level. Internet access and full mobility across INs was provided to all nodes in the CZ. Further, the Meghadoot protocol is completely transparent at the application level. Although there is an implementation of Meghadoot in user space, the performance of a user-space protocol is much lower than that of a kernel-space one as it involves the additional overhead of copying network packets from kernel-space to user-space and back.