POPROW - PopRouting On WiSHFUL

Project website - WiSHFUL Open Call 3

View project on GitHub

POPROW - PopRouting On WiSHFUL

The goal of the project (funded by the WiSHFUL Open Call 3 is to test and enhance “Pop-Routing”, a technique for wireless mesh link-state routing protocols that tunes the generation frequency of control messages independently for each node of a wireless mesh network as the result of real-time graph analysis performed on the network topology. Pop-Routing is backward-compatible and allows the reduction of the routing tables convergence time after a failure by a factor of up to 60%, or, conversely, it can keep the same convergence speed and reduce the total amount of control messages, thus reducing overhead and increasing the scalability of the protocol.

Pop-Routing theory was presented at IEEE Infocom 2016 (publisher link) and evaluated via emulation, the basic prototypes for a real implementation have been developed, and functional tests of prototypes are under review, OLSRv2 integration has been proven feasible. Further research is needed to fully understand Pop-Routing potentials.

The WiSHFUL infrastructure enables testing Pop-Routing in real conditions, and in particular, in scenarios in which we can fully control and modify the underlying physical and logical connectivity. This is a key task since Pop-Routing is dynamic: it changes the frequency with which control messages are generated on a per-node basis depending on the modification of the network topology. The great flexibility, total control and the monitoring functions that UPIs provide will empower a multi-layer analysis where we can compare the evolution of the physical network (which we control) with the evolution of the routing graph (which we monitor) and check how fast and consistent are the updates generated by Pop-Routing.

The project pursued two goals:

  • Improve, tune and extend Pop-Routing algorithms in order to achieve scientific breakthrough that will produce top-level scientific publications;
  • Stabilize Pop-Routing open source code in order to move one crucial step towards the implementation of Pop-Routing in real networks.

Team

The team is composed by five people: