Nomadic Routers for Rapidly Deployable Wireless Networks

A "rapidly deployable wireless network" is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary local area network without the aid of any established infrastructure of centralized administration and without any user-initiated configuration actions. Examples of situations where such networks are needed include the front lines in a battlefield, autonomous ground and aerial vehicles used in military operations, disaster recovery operations where the normal infrastructure has been destroyed, and search and rescue operations in remote areas where the network infrastructure is unavailable. Rapidly deployable wireless networks contain mobile nodes that act as routers. Such nodes, called "nomadic routers", must implement some sort of a routing protocol to discover multi-hop paths through the network. Building nomadic routers for rapidly deployable wireless networks presents a challenge because of the stringent size, weight, and power constraints associated with mobile nodes. This Phase I SBIR effort seeks to establish the viability of a new approach for building nomadic routers based on an innovative routing protocol called "adaptive source routing. This approach allows the router functions to be implemented within mobile nodes with simple, low-cost hardware and some supporting software.