On fault tolerant ad hoc network design

Minimal configuration and quick deployment of ad hoc networks make it suitable for numerous applications such as emergency situations, border monitoring, and military missions, etc. For such ad hoc networks to fulfill their mission in a timely manner, they should be able to establish a connection between nodes and to maintain this connection until the communication halts. Establishing a connection is achieved by using a routing protocol, and maintaining it is achieved by having a resilient fault tolerant network. In this paper, we propose a network design scheme that incorporates these features. We first propose a special network topology that is unique in terms of how nodes are interconnected. After constructing the initial topology, we propose a distributed routing protocol that allows any two sites to communicate by traversing at most 2 nodes regardless of the network size. We conducted both simulation study and theoretical analysis; the results show that the proposed scheme is resilient to network dynamics and has high quality as well as efficient routing.