A DHT-Based Routing Solution for Hierarchical MANETs

This thesis presents an effective routing solution for the backbone of hierarchical MANETs. Our solution leverages the storage and retrieval mechanisms of a DHT to make routing information available in a decentralized fashion, while supporting different forms of node and network mobility scenarios effectively. We do so by splitting a flat network into clusters, each having a gateway who participates in a DHT overlay. These gateways interconnect the clusters in a backbone network. Two routing approaches for the backbone are explored: flooding, which we use as a base approach, and our solution, which is DHT-based. We compare the performance of our solution against the flooding approach via experimentation in a simulator. Our results show that our DHT-based solution, even in the presence of mobility, achieved above 90 % success rates and maintained very low and constant round trip times, which was not the case with the flooding approach.