Implementation of an Improved AODV Routing Protocol for Maritime Ad-hoc Networks

Maritime ad-hoc network (MANET) is a promising technique to support cost-efficient ship-to-ship and shore-to-ship wireless broadband communications. In this paper, we present an improved Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol for the MANET. The proposed routing protocol termed AIS-aided AODV (A-AODV) can reduce the amount of flooding in the routing discovery processes by utilizing the ship location information provided by the shipborne Automatic Identification System (AIS) device. Further, the A-AODV software implementation scheme is proposed and the functions of the A-AODV software are verified via experiments based on a MANET testbed. The experimental results show that the proposed A-AODV protocol can supports multi-hop broadband data transmission with a lower routing overhead.