Integration of MANET with In-Band SDN Controller

Abstract

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are Infrastructureless mobile networks that can be formed with a group of wireless devices. To establish communication, MANETs require a routing protocol to discover an end-to-end route under uncertain network topology due to node mobility. The traditional reactive routing protocol discovers the shortest route using only the node’s local information and keeps utilizing the route until it collapses. This kind of method might not conform to the recent network condition. In this paper, we propose an SDN- based routing protocol for MANETs. By assigning a node in the network to act as an SDN controller, the route discovery action will be centralized. Since the SDN controller is not designed to support multi-hop wireless communication, we additionally design a mechanism to maintain connectivity between the controller and mobile nodes. The controller utilizes link-state information of every node to decide a route upon request. The simulation result shows that the proposed protocol overcomes the aforementioned routing problem. The generated route requests are decreased which indicating an increase in route stability, resulting in a better packet delivery ratio.