Continual 4G Cell Coverage for the Nodes during a Gateway Failure using BATMAN-Adv
William Crowe, Tae Tom Oh · 2020
Cellular networks have become a critical part of business, particularly for machine-to-machine communication. The issue that these wireless 4G nodes are faced with is that 4G cell coverage may not be available so a node cannot be placed in a location or a cell site could go offline, and communication is lost. This paper will cover using Batman-Adv an Ad-Hoc Routing Protocol to dynamically share cellular connections with a pool of hosts that do not have an internet connection. Utilizing Batman-Adv, nodes that have a cellular connection are propagated in the Ad-Hoc Network to all the other nodes. In the event the cellular conditions change or a node in the network goes offline, the Batman-Adv Network will rapidly switch to the next best node with a cellular connection. The result expected is an Ad-Hoc Network sharing multiple cellular connection with its peers and capable of performing rapid routing convergence using Batman-Adv. For machine-to-machine communication this means nodes outside cell coverage can communicate to a node with a cellular connection without the need of an infrastructure network. Even if every host has cell coverage, in the event a cell site going offline, the impacted nodes could find a route to a host that has an active connection. This would increase the robustness of machine-to-machine communication and reduce deploying costly infrastructure networks.