We propose and evaluate a scalable position-publish and an accompanying routing protocol which is efficient despite operating with imperfect information regarding the destination's location. The traffic generated by our position-publish protocol fits within the transport capacity of large mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) with constant communication bandwidth allocated for routing overhead, even as the network size increases. 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) 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 therefore 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, and these analytical design prescriptions are verified using simulations.
@cite_0: When n identical randomly located nodes, each capable of transmitting at W bits per second and using a fixed range, form a wireless network, the throughput spl lambda (n) obtainable by each node for a randomly chosen destination is spl Theta (W spl radic (nlogn)) bits per second under a noninterference protocol. If the nodes are optimally placed in a disk of unit area, traffic patterns are optimally assigned, and each transmission's range is optimally chosen, the bit-distance product that can be transported by the network per second is spl Theta (W spl radic An) bit-meters per second. Thus even under optimal circumstances, the throughput is only spl Theta (W spl radic n) bits per second for each node for a destination nonvanishingly far away. Similar results also hold under an alternate physical model where a required signal-to-interference ratio is specified for successful receptions. Fundamentally, it is the need for every node all over the domain to share whatever portion of the channel it is utilizing with nodes in its local neighborhood that is the reason for the constriction in capacity. Splitting the channel into several subchannels does not change any of the results. Some implications may be worth considering by designers. Since the throughput furnished to each user diminishes to zero as the number of users is increased, perhaps networks connecting smaller numbers of users, or featuring connections mostly with nearby neighbors, may be more likely to be find acceptance.
@cite_3: We propose FResher Encounter SearcH (FRESH), a simple algorithm for efficient route discovery in mobile ad hoc networks. Nodes keep a record of their most recent encounter times with all other nodes. Instead of searching for the destination, the source node searches for any intermediate node that encountered the destination more recently than did the source node itself. The intermediate node then searches for a node that encountered the destination yet more recently, and the procedure iterates until the destination is reached. Therefore, FRESH replaces the single network-wide search of current proposals with a succession of smaller searches, resulting in a cheaper route discovery. Routes obtained are loop-free.The performance of such a scheme will depend on the nodes' mobility processes. Under standard mobility processes our simulations show that route discovery cost can be decreased by an order of magnitude, a significant gain given that route discovery is a major source of routing overhead in ad hoc networks.
@cite_10: The capacity of ad hoc wireless networks is constrained by the mutual interference of concurrent transmissions between nodes. We study a model of an ad hoc network where n nodes communicate in random source-destination pairs. These nodes are assumed to be mobile. We examine the per-session throughput for applications with loose delay constraints, such that the topology changes over the time-scale of packet delivery. Under this assumption, the per-user throughput can increase dramatically when nodes are mobile rather than fixed. This improvement can be achieved by exploiting a form of multiuser diversity via packet relaying.
@cite_6: 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
For the routing scheme in this paper and the preceding references, mobility is a nuisance that increases routing overhead. However, when delay in message delivery is not an issue, Grossglauser and Tse have shown in @cite_10 that mobility can actually help us get around the transport capacity limits derived by Gupta and Kumar @cite_0 . In a similar spirit, mobility can be exploited to reduce the overhead of location updates, as argued in @cite_6 @cite_3 . However, this is not the regime of interest to us, since we are interested in delivering packets to their destinations with minimal delay.