Effect of Information on Routing Performance in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

A key issue impacting wireless network performance is network information. In wireless networks, a significant amount of bandwidth and power resource is consumed to disseminate and maintain routing information. Previous work has presented different methods to broadcast and store such routing information so as to reduce the overhead. However, the amount of information required for a routing algorithm to be effective is not studied theoretically. In this paper, we consider two kinds of routing information, i.e., location information and link state information, and study the quantitative relationship between the available routing information and network performance. It is assumed that each node in the network can only obtain information of its k-hop neighbors, and for each packet, a distance vector based algorithm is employed to minimize the number of hops for the packet to reach its destination with the limited information. We then present a methodology to derive the analytical result on the quantitative relationship between routing performance and the information available for each node. The analysis in this paper can be a valuable tool on designing routing algorithms in wireless networks.