DART - Dynamic Address Routing

The DART-Project was created by Jakob Eriksson, Michalis Faloutsos and Srikanth Krishnamurthy from the University of California, Riverside. Its former name was PeerNet.

Motivation

How large can an ad-hoc network be? Current ad hoc routing architectures do not scale well and work inefficiently in networks of more than a few hundred nodes. Those routing protocols use static addressing which leads to a massive overhead problem in mobile networks as the number of nodes grows. The main idea behind DART is to seperate node's address and identity. DART satisfies the following properties which can be seen as guideline for a scalable and efficient solution:

• Localization of overhead
• Lightweight, decentralized protocols
• Zero-configuration
• Minimal restrictions on hardware

Using dynamic addressing and appropriate routing, DART is a promising approach for achieving scalable routing in large ad hoc networks.

Principles

Identity & Address

The identity of a peer is a static number which is globally unique and stays the same throughout the lifetime of the node. The address of a node is represented by a k-bit number. It is dynamic and changes with node movement. Moreover, the address has a topological meaning since its current value reflects the node's location. The "address-disparate-identity" paradigma is totally opposed to traditional network protocols as IP.