The unit disk graph (UDG) is a widely employed model for the study of wireless networks. In this model, wireless nodes are represented by points in the plane and there is an edge between two points if and only if their Euclidean distance is at most one. A hop spanner for the UDG is a spanning subgraph @math such that for every edge @math in the UDG the topological shortest path between @math and @math in @math has a constant number of edges. The hop stretch factor of @math is the maximum number of edges of these paths. A hop spanner is plane (i.e. embedded planar) if its edges do not cross each other. The problem of constructing hop spanners for the UDG has received considerable attention in both computational geometry and wireless ad hoc networks. Despite this attention, there has not been significant progress on getting hop spanners that (i) are plane, and (ii) have low hop stretch factor. Previous constructions either do not ensure the planarity or have high hop stretch factor. The only construction that satisfies both conditions is due to Catusse, Chepoi, and Vax e s (2010); their plane hop spanner has hop stretch factor at most 449. Our main result is a simple algorithm that constructs a plane hop spanner for the UDG. In addition to the simplicity, the hop stretch factor of the constructed spanner is at most 341. Even though the algorithm itself is simple, its analysis is rather involved. Several results on the plane geometry are established in the course of the proof. These results are of independent interest.
The simplest model of a wireless network graph is the Unit Disk Graph (UDG): an edge exists in UDG if the Euclidean distance between its endpoints is ≤ 1. The problem of constructing planar spanners of Unit Disk Graphs with respect to the Euclidean distance has received considerable attention from researchers in computational geometry and ad-hoc wireless networks. In this paper, we present an algorithm that, given a set X of terminals in the plane, constructs a planar hop spanner with constant stretch factor for the Unit Disk Graph defined by X. Our algorithm improves on previous constructions in the sense that (i) it ensures the planarity of the whole spanner while previous algorithms ensure only the planarity of a backbone subgraph; (ii) the hop stretch factor of our spanner is significantly smaller. We propose a new geometric spanner for static wireless ad hoc networks, which can be constructed efficiently in a localized manner. It integrates the connected dominating set and the local Delaunay graph to form a backbone of the wireless network. Priori arts showed that both structures can be constructed locally with bounded communication costs. This new spanner has these following attractive properties: 1) the backbone is a planar graph, 2) the node degree of the backbone is bounded from above by a positive constant, 3) it is a spanner for both hops and length, 4) it can be constructed locally and is easy to maintain when the nodes move around, and 5) moreover, the communication cost of each node is bounded by a constant. Simulation results are also presented for studying its practical performance. Several localized routing protocols (see Bose, P. and Morin, P., Proc. 10th Annual Int. Symp. on Algorithms and Computation ISAAC, 1999) guarantee the delivery of packets when the underlying network topology is the Delaunay triangulation of all wireless nodes. However, it is expensive to construct the Delaunay triangulation in a distributed manner. Given a set of wireless nodes, we more accurately model the network as a unit-disk graph, UDG, in which a link between two nodes exists only if the distance between them is at most the maximum transmission range. Given a graph H, a spanning subgraph G of H is a t-spanner if the length of the shortest path connecting any two points in G is no more than t times the length of the shortest path connecting the two points in H. We present a novel localized networking protocol that constructs a planar 2.5-spanner of UDG, called the localized Delaunay triangulation, as network topology. It contains all edges that are in both the UDG and the Delaunay triangulation of all wireless nodes. Our experiments show that the delivery rates of existing localized routing protocols are increased when localized Delaunay triangulation is used instead of several previously proposed topologies. The total communication cost of our networking protocol is O(n log n) bits. Moreover, the computation cost of each node u is O(d sub u log d sub u ), where d sub u is the number of 1-hop neighbors of u in UDG.