Research on Ad Hoc networking Based on TETRA DMO

LIU Meng, LI Hai, HOU Shujuan

School of Information and Electronics
Beijing Institute of Technology
Beijing, China
E-mail: liumeng2464@163.com, haili@bit.edu.cn, shujuanhou@bit.edu.cn
AbstractDirect Mode Operation (DMO) is an important
mode of operation supported by TErrestrial Trunked Radio
(TETRA) standard. However, TETRA-DMO cannot perform
multi-hop communication, limiting both the coverage and the
scalability of the whole network. An approach to building an
ad hoc network based on TEREA DMO technology and a
proactive routing protocol, Optimized Link State Routing
Protocol (OLSR) is proposed. The algorithm of DMO
Multipoint Relay (DMR) selection is also introduced.
Performance analysis indicates the call setup delay of group
call service can meet the requirement of TETEA.
Keywords-TETRA DMO, Ad hoc Network, Proactive Routing
Protocol, OLSR
I. INTRODUCTION
ETSI Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) [1] is the most
popular digital trunked mobile radio standard and is widely
accepted among Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) user
organizations, such as public safety, the government and the
military. In addition to the classical infrastructure-based
Trunked Mode Operation (TMO), TETRA supports a Direct
Mode Operation (DMO) in which nodes can communicate
with each other without the network infrastructure. DMO can
be used when the mobile station (MS) is located outside the
coverage area of the network, or as a more secure
communication channel within the coverage of the network.
Besides voice service, DMO supports circuit mode data
(with different protection levels), short data service and
status messages.
In DMO, communications between Mobile Stations (MS)
may involve, at most, two hops in terms of transmission
range. However, the standard does not allow building multi-
hop networks. Besides, there are still several limitations in
DMO: the repeater is an independent facility to be arranged
in advance; for a certain communication, only one repeater
can be used; the relative position of the repeater and MSs has
a greater impact on the coverage; MSs that are outside of the
repeaters coverage cannot use the repeater, or even cannot
setup a call.
Some proposals for the extension of TETRA DMO
technology have been put forward. Reference [2] proposes a
design of multi-hop network formed by the integration of
both TETRA DMO and IEEE 802.11 communication, in
which the special devices called mobile node are used that
incorporates both a TETRA-DMO transceiver and one or
more Wi-Fi boards. Reference [3] proposes to design an IP-
based TETRA ad hoc network by adapting DMO air
interface to TETRA Advanced Packet Service (TAPS) Um
interface. However, TETRA has a strict requirement of fast
call setup (typically, < 300ms), which is difficult to meet in
multi-hop 802.11 network or TAPS. Both [2] and [3] neither
evaluate the expected performance of their proposed
solutions nor give any experimental results. In [4], a
transmission solution of short message based on TETRA
DMO is proposed. However, this proposal is limited to a
maximum of two hops supported in TETRA DMO and not
applicable to voice communication. In [5], a wireless mesh
network based on TETRA technology is proposed by
introducing a forwarding scheme and a routing protocol to
TETRA DMO to support multi-hop communication. But this
proposal may suffer an unacceptable call set up delay with a
reactive routing protocol.
In this paper, an extension of TEREA DMO technology
to build an ad hoc network with a proactive routing protocol
is proposed, which focuses mainly on group call service, a
key feature in PMR systems. In the next section, the design
of our proposal is described. Section 3 discusses the key
modifications to the TETRA standard. Future works are
discussed in Section 4. Section 5 gives the conclusion.
II. TETRADMOMESH NETWORK
In this section, a brief overview on TETRA DMO
technology and Optimized Link State Routing Protocol
(OLSR), a proactive routing protocol is given. And then the
proposal for an extension toward ad hoc network based on
TETRA DMO technology is described.
A. TETRA Direct Mode Operation
The DMO physical layer is designed to be compatible
with trunked mode operation. Hence the DMO access
scheme is Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) with
carrier separation of 25 kHz. The basic radio resource is the
timeslot. A group of four timeslots constitutes a frame and
eighteen consecutives frames constitute a multiframe. The
duration of a timeslot is 14,167 ms. The modulation rate is
36 kbit/s. The physical content of timeslots is carried by a
burst. A Direct Mode physical channel is composed of two
non-consecutive timeslots. In DMO, a frequency carrier
supports simultaneously up to two channels.
TETRA DMO usually employs only one channel per
carrier, which is known as a normal mode of operation.
When two channels per carrier are used simultaneously,
which is known as frequency efficient mode, the operation
becomes more complex. Transmissions are performed in the
timeslot 1 and timeslot 3 (corresponding to channel A) or
timeslot 2 and 4 (corresponding to channel A) of each frame.
2011 International Conference on Instrumentation, Measurement, Computer, Communication and Control
978-0-7695-4519-6/11 $26.00 2011 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/IMCCC.2011.205
808
The slot numbers of channel A and channel B are illustrated
in Fig.1.
TETRA DMO supports several operating modes, such as
dual watch, repeater and gateway. The purpose of repeaters
is to stabilize and extend the range of DM MS-MS
communication. A DM-REP receives information from one
MS and re-transmits it to other DM-MSs over the air
interface. There are three kinds of DM Repeaters: Type 1A,
Type 1B and Type 2. Their operating modes are showed in
Fig.2. In DMO, the calling user is called Master, and the
called user is called Slave[6].
B. Proactive Routing Protocol
Routing mechanisms currently used in ad-hoc networks
may be classified into two main groups: reactive and
proactive solutions. Reactive solutions may introduce an
additional delay, when initiating the communication or the
transaction, if there is no available route. This may be an
inconvenience because emergency communications require a
fast call set-up. On the contrary, proactive solutions do not
introduce this initial extra delay because they already have
the routes available at expense of sending periodic control
messages. We use a proactive routing protocol, OLSR [7], in
this paper.
In OLSR, each node selects a subset of its symmetric 1-
hop neighbor nodes as "multipoint relays" (MPR) and only
MPR nodes are responsible for forwarding control traffic,
intended for diffusion into the entire network. This technique
substantially reduces the message overhead as compared to a
classical flooding mechanism, where every node retransmits
each message when it receives the first copy of the message.
C. Extensions of TETRA DMO toward Ad Hoc Network
The TETRA DMO technology, as stated in the previous
section, does not allow building multi-hop networks and
cannot use more than one repeater at a time. In order to
overcome these shortcomings a new method is proposed
based on minimum modifications of the standard in this
paper. Routing capabilities are core feature required and a
proactive routing technology is used to minimize the call set
up delay.
1) Local topology discovery
Local topology discovery is the first step in our solution.
This task is completed by taking advantage of the hello
message mechanism which is commonly used by the
proactive routing protocol in mobile ad hoc networks.
Hello message containing a list of 1-hop neighborhood is
broadcasted periodically in 1-hop radius by each node. Each
neighbor node has an associated status of either "symmetric"
or "asymmetric". "Symmetric" indicates that the link to that
neighbor node has been verified to be bi-directional, i.e., it is
possible to transmit data in both directions. "Asymmetric"
indicates that HELLO messages from the node have been
heard, but it is not confirmed that this node is also able to
receive messages.
2) DMR selection
Each node selects a set of nodes in its symmetric 1-hop
neighborhood which are responsible to retransmit its
messages. This set of selected neighbor nodes is called the
DMO Multipoint Relay (DMR) set of that node. The
neighbors, which are not in the DMR set, receive and
process the messages but do not retransmit the messages.
Theoretically, the DMR set is selected so that it can cover all
2-hop neighbor nodes. For group call service in our solution,
DMRs need to work simultaneously. The number of DMR,
therefore, is limited by the number of channels offered in
DMO technology.
The repeater Type 2 of TETRA DMO is suitable to
support two simultaneous calls using the so-called channel A
and channel B in each of the two carriers used by Type 2
repeaters. In other words, four channels can be used
simultaneously. In this case, up to three DMRs can be
selected, by which the maximum number of 2-hop neighbor
nodes should be covered. We give an algorithm for the DMR
selection. The following terminology will be used in the
description of the algorithm.
S: the node that is to setup a call and performs this
algorithm. The call setup procedure will not be initiated if S
cannot find any 1-hop neighbor, i.e., S is isolated.
N: the set of symmetric 1-hop neighborhood of S;
N2: the set of 2-hop neighborhood of S;
D(x): the degree of a node x (where x is a member of N)
is defined as the number of nodes in N2 for which node x
can provide reachability to S.
The algorithm is as follows:
a) For each node in N, calculate D(x), where x is a
member of N. If there is no any 2-hop neighbor for S, then
D(x) will be zero and there is no need to select DMR.
b) Select the node with the maximum degree as the
first DMR, named DMR_1.
Figure 1. Timeslot number for each channel
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Figure 2. Frequency usage for three type of repeaters
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c) Remove all the 2-hop neighbors from N2 that can be
covered by DMR_1 and recalculate D(x), where x is a
member of N except DMR_1. Select the node with the
maximum degree as the second DMR, named DMR_2. If
DMR_2 doesnt exists, Select DMR_2 from the 1-hop
neighbors of DMR_1.
d) Similar to the procedure c), select the third DMR,
named DMR_3, if there are still members in N2. If DMR_3
doesnt exists, Select DMR_3 from the 1-hop neighbors of
DMR_1 or DMR_2.
As showed in Fig.3, by taking advantage of 3 DMRs, the
number of nodes participating in the group call is much
larger than those with a peer-to-peer manner or with only one
repeater. Our solution, therefore, can extend the
communication range significantly for group call servers and
enhance the flexibility of networks.
In some scenarios, DMRs are multi-hop neighbors of
node S. For example, the calling node S is at the edge of the
group, as showed in Fig.4. DMR_1 and DMR_2 are selected
by node S, while DMR_3 is selected form the neighbors of
DMR_2 to making use of the idle channel. DMR_3 is called
as Multi-hop DMR.
3) Call Setup procedure
Next a set up procedure according to the scenario in Fig.4
is given. The setup message broadcasted by node S contains
the information about the selection of DMRs according to
which the receiving nodes take their actions. For the 1-hop
neighbor node, like D1, it should only process the messages
without retransmitting them. For DMR_2, it needs not only
to process the messages received from node S, but also to
retransmit them. DMR_1 has an additional task assigned by
node S, selecting a Multi-hop DMR. DMR_3 is selected and
it will make another retransmission. For D3, it will join the
call as a 3-hop neighbor of node S.
III. IMPLEMENTATION AND ANALYSIS
This section is focused on the practical implementation
of our proposal and an analysis of the call set up time is
given.
A. Protocol Data Unit (PDU) Definition
1) DM HELLO PDU
A new PDU should be added to carry HELLO message
for local topology discovery. DM HELLO PDU can be
carried in the Direct Mode Synchronization Bursts (DSB).
According to TETRA DMO standard, there are still two
available SYNC PDU types that can be carried in the DSB.
Thereby one of them is proposed to be used to define our
HELLO message, named DM HELLO PDU, which is used
to broadcast 1-hop neighbor information of the symmetric or
asymmetric nodes. Table 1 shows the most relevant elements
in the DM HELLO PDU. The value of SYNC PDU type of
DM HELLO is set to 10
2
.
Each node is assigned a 10-bit repeater-like address as
the neighbor address in order to minimize the cost of bits in
DM HELLO PDU. It then should be additionally addressable
by neighbor address besides of its own TETRA Subscriber
Identity (TSI) family addresses.
B. DMAC-SYNC PDU with DMR information
The node setting up a call needs to select its DMRs and
assign channel for them. The information about DMRs
should be broadcasted with the setup message. In TETRA
DMO standard, the DM-SETUP PDU generated at layer 3 is
encapsulated in the DMAC-SYNC PDU at layer 2, named
Data Link Layer (DLL). Therefore, we replace the Repeater
address and Gateway address element of DMAC-SYNC
PDU in SCH/H channel with DMR information represented
in Table 2.
Figure 4. Multi-hop DMR selection
Figure 3. 1-hop DMR selection
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TABLE 1. MAIN ELEMENTS OF DMHELLOPDU
Information element Length Type
SYNC PDU type 2 M
Numbers of SYM nodes 6 M
Addresses of symmetric nodes
Numbers of ASYM nodes 6 M
Addresses of asymmetric nodes
TABLE 2. INFORMATION ABOUT DMR IN DMAC-SYNC PDU
Information element Length Type
Number of DMR 3 M
Address of DMR_1 10 C
Channel assigned to DMR_1 2 C
Multi-hop DMR selection 2 C
Address of DMR_2 10 C
Channel assigned to DMR_2 2 C
Address of DMR_3 10 C
Channel assigned to DMR_3 2 C
C. Performance Analysis
According to the scenario in Fig.4, the usage of the
wireless interface for each DMR and the end-to-end delay
suffered in the communication for this case are illustrated in
Fig.5. In the call setup procedure, the first transmission is
preceded by a sequence of synchronization bursts which may
have a length between 2 and 4 frames. Assuming the best
case (according to the standard), the achieved global call
setup time is the end-to-end delay plus 113.34 ms (2 frames),
as shown in Table 3. We meet the requirement of fast call
setup, the well known figure of less than 300ms as standard
TRTEA offers.
IV. FUTURE WORK
The period for nodes to broadcast hello message has a
great impact on the network performance. An appropriate
HELLO emission interval is determined by several factors,
such as transmission power and the mobility of nodes. This
is for further study.
The number of DMRs is limited and only one group is
able to communicate at any given time due to the wireless
interface and the work mode provided by TETRA DMO
technology. Additional work is needed in order to consider
further modifications of the standard that may improve
performance.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, an extension of TEREA DMO technology
to build an ad hoc network with a proactive routing protocol
is proposed and the 300 ms set-up time that TETRA should
offer can be fulfilled. Our solution can extend the
communication range significantly for group call servers and
enhance the flexibility of networks.
TABLE 3 DELAY OF DIFFERENT DMRS
DMR End-to-end delay Call set up delay
DMR_1 56.67ms (4 slots) 170.01ms
DMR_2 70.84ms (5 slots) 184.18ms
DMR_3 70.84ms (9 slots) 240.85ms
REFERENCES
[1] TETRA MoU Association Limited. http://www.tetramou.com
[2] R. F. Luca Adamo, Matteo Rosi, Daniele Tarchi and Federico Frosali,
"Analysis and Design of a TETRA-DMO and IEEE 802.11 integrated
network", In Proc. of IWCMC, Caen, France, July, 2010.
[3] H. XiaoBen, "Study on TETRA DMO and Mobile Ad-Hoc
Networking."
[4] F. Eidlert, "Messaging and positioning in a dynamic TETRA
environment," 2009.
[5] C. G. P. Plans, J. Ferrer, and J. Paradells., "TETRA as a building
block to WMNs," 2007.
[6] ETSI ETS 300 396-1, "Terrestrial trunked radio (TETRA); technical
requirements for direct mode operation (DMO); part 1: General
network design." ETSI, 1998.
[7] T. Clausen and P. Jacquet. Optimized link state routing protocol
(OLSR). RFC 3626 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3626.txt, 2003.
Figure.5 Usage of the wireless interface for each DMR
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