Better Approach To Mobile Ad-hoc Networking in MaritimeManet

Thales S.A. has created an experimental mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) node called MaritimeManet. To improve MaritimeManet’s performance, directional antennas are used, as opposed to omnidirectional antennas. There already exist some routing protocols used in MANETs, however it is not clear how they perform in nodes with directional antennas. This research investigated whether Better Approach To Mobile Ad-hoc Networking (BATMAN) is a suitable routing protocol to be used in conjunction with MaritimeManet. BATMAN has been found to be able to fully support multiple network interfaces (antennas), and to maintain distinct connections using multiple antennas at once. BATMAN has also proved to recognize and adopt to dynamic network topology. Convergence time in BATMAN has been found to be linearly proportional to BATMAN Originator Message (OGM) interval.