Decentralized network architectures like MANETs make it difficult to leverage SDN capabilities like centralized path construction since routing is managed by participants' local topology knowledge. Such a distributed routing behavior characterizes MANETs as robust as a certain number of node failures can be covered by participants. However, distributed routing based on inconsistent and incomplete topology knowledge of participants leads to inefficient path constructions. This decreases the residual transmission capacity of the MANETs which could be improved with complete and up-to-date topology knowledge. Previous research proposed RFTKR, an algorithm providing up-to-date topology knowledge stored on a controller in the MANET. Thus, routing can leverage SDN capabilities, where path construction is outsourced to the controller. Participants forward flows based on these paths. However, an open question is still how to maintain a route to this controller for each participant to request new routes. This requirement challenges even more since nodes are moving continuously. Also, control and routing messages must be kept minimal since transmission capacities in MANETs are restricted. This research tackles this challenge and presents RTC, an algorithm that rearranges participants of the MANET to a tree. Participants of this tree, maintain their route to their controller while keeping the message overhead as minimal as possible. Results prove the correct functionality of RTC. In addition, further simulations verify that tree rearrangements minimize the message overhead at runtime.     «

Decentralized network architectures like MANETs make it difficult to leverage SDN capabilities like centralized path construction since routing is managed by participants' local topology knowledge. Such a distributed routing behavior characterizes MANETs as robust as a certain number of node failures can be covered by participants. However, distributed routing based on inconsistent and incomplete topology knowledge of participants leads to inefficient path constructions. This decreases the resid...     »