High Level Specification of a Geographic Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are designed for wireless communication and require no fixed infrastructure as the mobile hosts also perform routing tasks. The high dynamics of such self-organizing networks require routing strategies substantially different from those employed in static communication networks. Because of the high mobility and limited resources in MANETs, designing an efficient and reliable routing strategy becomes a very challenging problem and received a lot of attention in recent years. Although there are various protocols of MANETs, they are all described in a theoretical basis. From a software engineering point of view, the theoretical aspects are often very hard to understand by a software development team. Also, the cost of implementing such protocols in order to compare the performance of various protocols is too high. Therefore, the idea of trying to use high-level executable specification languages came into our mind. We define a distributed abstract state machine (DASM) model of the network layer protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. We represent a DASM model and a high-level SDL specification of a layered communication architecture for an efficient geographic routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Our goal of modelling the protocols with ASMs is to support the definition and validation of wireless communication protocols and implementations based thereon. Our objective to define high-level specification with SDL for the protocols is to sharpen loosely defined system requirements into an architectural specification serving as a formal basis for analysing key system properties by analytical means and experimental validation using commercial SDL tools.