Advances And Future Of Routing Protocols

In this modern era of technology, where almost nothing can be achieved without communication. Therefore, it’s important that the information transferred over the internet reaches its destination without any major delays and/or corruption. A simple conversation in human language can be understood by us because we are self-aware and sentient, which isn’t the same case when it comes to computers as they can’t do anything by themselves. We must first define certain set of rules of how the data should be efficiently transferred over in machine language.

Introduction to Routing Protocols (RP)

The Internet is a vast global interconnection of many computers which have many routes between each other which are then again interconnected by routers in between. It is the router’s job to choose the most optimal route to send data towards the destination, that is much shorter in distance and is easier to send. The RPs uses certain software or routing algorithms which defines how the data is transferred over a given network. Initially, when connected, the routers exchange information between neighbours that are in the immediate vicinity. This way they gather data about the general topology of the network. Later when the most optimal path is down temporarily either due to a software/hardware malfunction, the router can still choose the second-best route and so on to send the data without any problems.

Literature Review

Routing Information Protocol (RIP) was the first RP ever created way back in the 1980s and then Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), and Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS) protocols soon followed. These are the examples of Interior Gateway Protocols (IGP) which takes place inside the networks that you administrate. Outside this network, it is handled by the Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP), example: Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Other RPs were soon implemented which were designed specifically for certain applications such as: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSN).

Future and Scope

It’s clear that based on the applications mentioned above, we can say that the routing protocols can be further implemented and designed for the future applications that demand its need.

Conclusion and open issues

We will be now concluding this report by discussing some of the open issues till date and how they could be improved. We have discussed RPs for homogenous type are more widely discussed over heterogenous and compared to static WSN and mobile WSN, the latter has more advantages for real-time guaranteed delivery along with energy-conservation, large coverage area and efficiency but comes with a cost. Using a reliable routing metric is quite important which should measure capability and overhead routing in WSNs. Heterogeneity requires furthermore study as it’s complex and deployment cost is high as of now. The nodes in WSN are vulnerable for attacks where secure routing require further planning in the future. The current QoS metrics doesn’t have good balancing between guaranteed packet delivery and energy-efficiency, which requires special investigation in this field.

Synthetic benchmarks of the newer protocols show promise when compared to the older ones, but they tend to yield additional problems in real-case scenarios that can be foreseen if there are stronger benchmarks studies. The RPs that use multisink triumph over the RPs that use only a single sink, however doing so introduces security holes which needs attention. In our next application of UWSN: we can further optimize GDflood for a better performance. The less original data content is re-transmitted the second time thereby delivering all the data. This results in reduction of end to end delay and total energy consumption. It means that we could achieve better results with just a single transmission.

The other idea is to flood more data packets across nodes using Network Coding. Which in turn increases the chances for the destination to receive the information without any redundant data. Hybrid void handling techniques should be deployed in a new environment as it will become more lucid why a hybrid approach is necessary for UWSN. There should be a dedicated protocol that detects trapped nodes before the transmission to avoid forwarding problems. Void-Handling techniques are applied on shallow regions rather than deeper areas. It would be interesting to know if these techniques can be still relied upon at such temperatures and pressure. We can understand the current hurdles of these void-handling techniques by conducting a real test study using a real testbed. Each void-handling technique is designed for a specific purpose, having its own advantages and disadvantages.