LUNAR Lightweight Underlay Network Ad-Hoc Routing

In this paper we present an new ad hoc routing system based upon simple principles regarding the routing strategy and the implementation approach. In the routing area we (re-)introduce the end-to-end principle, letting the communicating end nodes make the decisions concerning the behaviour of intermediate nodes. We adopt a routing strategy that is a mixture of on-demand and pro-active routing in order to minimize the possible down-times of communication paths. Implementation-wise we use explicit ”resolution commands” sent to neighbour nodes to provide LUNAR functionality. A freely available implementation has been produced that includes auto-configuration of IP network addresses and default gateway routing, making LUNAR a fully self-configuring ad-hoc routing solution which supports both unicast and broadcast styles of communication. In a direct comparison LUNAR matched or outperformed the available Linux implementations of AODV and OLSR.