HYMAD: Hybrid DTN-MANET Routing for Dense and Highly Dynamic Wireless Networks

TL;DR

HYMAD is a hybrid routing protocol combining DTN and MANET techniques, designed for dense, highly dynamic wireless networks, improving data delivery performance by leveraging topological information exchange.

Contribution

The paper introduces HYMAD, a novel hybrid routing protocol that integrates DTN and MANET strategies for better performance in dynamic wireless networks.

Findings

HYMAD outperforms Spray-and-Wait in delivery ratio.

HYMAD reduces message delay compared to existing protocols.

The hybrid approach maintains resilience while improving efficiency.

Abstract

In this paper we propose HYMAD, a Hybrid DTN-MANET routing protocol which uses DTN between disjoint groups of nodes while using MANET routing within these groups. HYMAD is fully decentralized and only makes use of topological information exchanges between the nodes. We evaluate the scheme in simulation by replaying real life traces which exhibit this highly dynamic connectivity. The results show that HYMAD outperforms the multi-copy Spray-and-Wait DTN routing protocol it extends, both in terms of delivery ratio and delay, for any number of message copies. Our conclusion is that such a Hybrid DTN-MANET approach offers a promising venue for the delivery of elastic data in mobile ad-hoc networks as it retains the resilience of a pure DTN protocol while significantly improving performance.