Plane-separated routing in ad-hoc networks

Control and user (data) plane separation (CUPS) is a concept applied in various networking areas to scale network resources independently, increase the quality of service, and facilitate the autonomy of networks. In this study, we leverage this concept to design a plane-separated routing algorithm, CUPS-based hierarchical routing algorithm (CHRA), as an energy-efficient and low-latency end-to-end communication scheme for clustered ad-hoc networks. In CHRA, while cluster heads constitute the control plane to conduct network discovery and routing, ordinary nodes residing in the user plane forward packets according to the routing decisions taken by the control plane. Exploiting the CUPS, we avoid exhausting cluster heads by offloading packet-forwarding to ordinary nodes and improve the quality of service by utilizing alternative paths other than the backbone of cluster heads. Our simulation results show that CHRA offers a better quality of service in terms of end-to-end latency and data-to-all ratio, and promotes fairness in energy-consumption in both stationary and mobile scenarios.