WALS: A Lightweight Stateless Label Switching Framework Based on Prime Theorem for MANETs

This article proposes an innovative unicast/multicast unified, cross-layer, and control/user-plane splitting forwarding method, called wireless arithmetic label switching (WALS), for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The WALS is based on a stateless approach: an arithmetic source-routed label is processed by the source and intermediate nodes without table lookup, causing lower protocol overheads and forwarding latency than the conventional stateless unicast/multicast routing protocols such as the dynamic source routing (DSR) and the differential destination multicast (DDM), respectively. Different from conventional unicasting/multicasting designs demanding distinct routing protocol stacks, the WALS requires a unified protocol stack, avoiding the need to distinguish unicast and multicast frames, thus simplifying the design of MANET devices. Mathematical analysis indicates that the WALS is highly scalable for both the network sizes and the number of multicast groups. Simulation results reveal that WALS effectively performs network scalability and the required overhead for the unicast and multicast capabilities. Additionally, WALS achieves superior to the other three state-of-the-art competitive multicast routing methods, including DVMRP, ODMRP, and MAODV on the performance of the packet processing latency and packet delivery ratio. As a result, the WALS can significantly enable the employment and management of integrated unicast and multicast services for MANETs.