Investigation Possibilities for Multi-Hop Routing in Resource Constrained Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks: ..

01.07.2004

Abstract:
Wireless networking has experienced a tremendous growth in the recent years. Due to application areas such as industrial monitoring, the development has also involved meeting the needs of low-cost, low power, and low data rate communication devices. Mobility in wireless networks introduce further challenges, and many efforts have been made to deal with this through various multi-hop routing schemes.

The Electronic Shepherd system has been developed to provide sheep and reindeer farmers in the rural areas of Norway with information describing the state and location of their flocks during the grazing season. The today's system consists of radio tags communicating with fixed and mobile base stations. This implies both high costs and limited communication range. Being able to add multi-hop routing functionality to this system would be a significant improvement.

This thesis investigates possibilities for adding such functionality to the Electronic Shepherd system, through the design and implementation of an adaptive poweraware multi-hop routing protocol. The results indicate that the class of protocols studied may not be applicable in environments with the memory constraints such as of the target platforms. A more simplistic approach is needed. The question whether it is possible to provide satisfactory routing functionality on these platforms remains open for now.