An Adaptive Geographic Internet Sub-Protocol for Dynamic Wireless Networks

In order to seamlessly integrate ad hoc and sensor networks with the Internet, we introduce a novel entity called Internet Sub-protocol Manager (ISM) that serves as the "bridge" between the standard IP and our geographic sub-protocol (SP). The standard IP stack (either IPv4 or IPv6) needs not to be changed. Rather, the ISM will encapsulate the original IP packets within the sub-protocol payload and provide an IP-in-SP tunneling. The sub-protocol exploits the geographical and mobility information available from the GPS equipped communication node and achieves position-based routing that incurs less storage and less processing overhead. The geographic routing provides alternate paths for such wireless nodes. While current geographic routing protocols are impractical, our proposed Cross Link Detection Protocol (CLDP) guarantees that geographic routing between all pairs of nodes will never fail. We have demonstrated that our approach achieves geographic routing correctly on real radio networks. ISM and our geographic routing protocol can be easily configured and we provide an efficient mechanism for wireless routing packet format discovery. In addition, we propose to adaptively manage the routes via proactive prediction of link expiration time and describe a method for differentiating link failure and congestion.