Low Latency Wireless Ad Hoc Networking: Power and Bandwidth Challenges and a Solution

This paper is concerned with the scaling of the number of relay nodes (i.e., hops) individual messages have to transit through in a large-scale wireless ad hoc network (WANET); we call this hop-count as network latency (NL). A large network latency affects all aspects of data communication in a WANET, including an increase in delay, packet loss, and the power needed to process and store messages in nodes lying on the relay path. We consider network management and data routing challenges in WANETs with scalable network latency, e.g., when NL increases only polylogarithmically in the network size. On the physical side, reducing network latency imposes a significantly higher power and bandwidth demand on nodes, and are captured in a set of new bounds derived in this paper. On the protocol front, designing distributed routing protocols that can guarantee the delivery of data packets within a scalable number of hops is a challenging task. To solve this, we introduce multi-resolution randomized hierarchy (MRRH), a novel power and bandwidth efficient WANET protocol with scalable network latency. MRRH uses a randomized algorithm for building and maintaining a random hierarchical network topology, which together with the proposed routing algorithm, can guarantee efficient delivery of data packets in the wireless network. For a network of size N, MRRH can provide an average latency of only O(log³ N). The power consumption and bandwidth requirements of MRRH are shown to be nearly optimal for the latency it provides. Therefore, MRRH is a provably efficient candidate for truly large-scale wireless ad hoc networking.