We present a novel geographical routing scheme for spontaneous wireless mesh networks. Greedy geographical routing has many advantages, but suffers from packet losses occurring at the border of voids. In this paper, we propose a flexible greedy routing scheme that can be adapted to any variant of geographical routing and works for any connectivity graph, not necessarily Unit Disk Graphs. The idea is to reactively detect voids, backtrack packets, and propagate information on blocked sectors to reduce packet loss. We also propose an extrapolating algorithm to reduce the latency of void discovery and to limit route stretch. Performance evaluation via simulation shows that our modified greedy routing avoids most of packet losses.
Geographic information can largely reduce complexity of routing in spontaneous mesh networks. The most simple and widely used protocol is greedy geographic routing @cite_4 @cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_12 : when a node receives a packet, it uses the following forwarding rule: is usually defined with respect to the distance towards the destination. Since improvement is not negative, there is no routing loops. Moreover, routing is scalable, because all routing decisions are local.
@cite_1 @cite_4 @cite_12 @cite_6
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Routing in large-scale mobile ad hoc networks is challenging because all the nodes are potentially moving. Geographic routing can partially alleviate this problem, as nodes can make local routing decisions based solely on the destinations' geographic coordinates. However, geographic routing still requires an efficient location service, i.e., a distributed database recording the location of every destination node. Devising efficient, scalable, and robust location services has received considerable attention in recent years. The main purpose of this paper is to show that node mobility can be exploited to disseminate destination location information without incurring any communication overhead. We achieve this by letting each node maintain a local database of the time and location of its last encounter with every other node in the network. This database is consulted by packets to obtain estimates of their destination's current location. As a packet travels towards its destination, it is able to successively refine an estimate of the destination's precise location, because node mobility has "diffused" estimates of that location. We define and analyze a very simple algorithm called EASE (exponential age search) and show that in a model where N nodes perform independent random walks on a square lattice, the length of the routes computed by EASE are on the same order as the distance between the source and destination even for very large N. Therefore, without exchanging any explicit location information, the length of EASE routes are within a constant factor of routes obtained with perfect information. We discuss refinements of the EASE algorithm and evaluate it through extensive simulations. We discuss general conditions such that the mobility diffusion effect leads to efficient routes without an explicit location service. In practical settings, where these conditions may not always be met, we believe that the mobility diffusion effect can complement existing location services and enhance their robustness and scalability. Routing in large-scale mobile ad hoc networks is challenging because all the nodes are potentially moving. Geographic routing can partially alleviate this problem, as nodes can make local routing decisions based solely on the destinations' geographic coordinates. However, geographic routing still requires an efficient location service, i.e., a distributed database recording the location of every destination node. Devising efficient, scalable, and robust location services has received considerable attention in recent years. The main purpose of this paper is to show that node mobility can be exploited to disseminate destination location information without incurring any communication overhead. We achieve this by letting each node maintain a local database of the time and location of its last encounter with every other node in the network. This database is consulted by packets to obtain estimates of their destination's current location. As a packet travels towards its destination, it is able to successively refine an estimate of the destination's precise location, because node mobility has "diffused" estimates of that location. We define and analyze a very simple algorithm called EASE (Exponential Age Search) and show that in a model where Theta(n) nodes perform independent random walks on a square lattice of size n, the length of the routes computed by EASE are of the same order as the distance between the source and destination even for very large n. Therefore, without disseminating any explicit location information, the length of EASE routes are within a constant factor of routes obtained with perfect information. We discuss refinements of the EASE algorithm and evaluate it through extensive simulations. We discuss general conditions such that the mobility diffusion effect leads to efficient routes without an explicit location service. In practical settings, where these conditions may not always be met, we believe that the mobility diffusion effect can complement existing location services and enhance their robustness and scalability We begin by asking whether geographic routing can scale when nodes are mobile; that is, can the overhead involved in tracking node locations be accommodated within the transport capacity of large-scale mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs)? We answer this question in the affirmative by proposing an efficient position publish protocol which fits within the transport capacity and a routing protocol that operates with imperfect information of the destination's location. The routing protocol guarantees, with high probability, routes whose lengths are within a constant “stretch” factor of the shortest path from source to destination. The key idea underlying the scalability of the publish protocol is for each potential destination node to send location updates (with frequency decaying with distance) only to a subset of network nodes, structured as annular regions around it (the natural approach of updating circular regions in distance-dependent fashion does not scale). The routing protocol must then account for the fact that the source and or relay nodes may not have estimates of the destination's location (or may have stale estimates). Spatial and temporal scaling of protocol parameters are chosen so as to guarantee scalability, route reliability and route stretch. Since ad hoc and sensor networks can be composed of a very large number of devices, the scalability of network protocols is a major design concern. Furthermore, network protocols must be designed to prolong the battery lifetime of the devices. However, most existing routing techniques for ad hoc networks are known not to scale well. On the other hand, the so-called geographical routing algorithms are known to be scalable but their energy efficiency has never been extensively and comparatively studied. In a geographical routing algorithm, data packets are forwarded by a node to its neighbor based on their respective positions. The neighborhood of each node is constituted by the nodes that lie within a certain radio range. Thus, from the perspective of a node forwarding a packet, the next hop depends on the width of the neighborhood it perceives. The analytical framework proposed in this paper allows to analyze the relationship between the energy efficiency of the routing tasks and the extension of the range of the topology knowledge for each node. A wider topology knowledge may improve the energy efficiency of the routing tasks but increases the cost of topology information due to signaling packets needed to acquire this information. The problem of determining the optimal topology knowledge range for each node to make energy efficient geographical routing decisions is tackled by integer linear programming. It is shown that the problem is intrinsically localized, i.e., a limited topology knowledge is sufficient to make energy efficient forwarding decisions. The leading forwarding rules for geographical routing are compared in this framework, and the energy efficiency of each of them is studied. Moreover, a new forwarding scheme, partial topology knowledge forwarding (PTKF), is introduced, and shown to outperform other existing schemes in typical application scenarios. A probe-based distributed protocol for knowledge range adjustment (PRADA) is finally introduced that allows each node to efficiently select online its topology knowledge range. PRADA is shown to rapidly converge to a near-optimal solution.