Routing in Wireless Networks of Varying Connectivity

We are concerned with routing data in networks where the topology ranges from dense to sparse and mostly connected to mostly disconnected. Connection orientated routing algorithms developed for connected environments fail in disconnected environments, due to the instability of these networks. Similarly, forwarding strategies designed to disseminate data hop-by-hop in disconnected environments fail in connected environments, as they send more packets than is required, resulting in congestion. Our algorithm exploits the re-occuring patterns in connectivity arising from the typical routine structure of day-to-day life. We present a functionality overview of the three components of our proposal: contact driven source routing, disconnection tolerant data forwarding and packet scheduling for energy efficiency. We evaluate our early emulations (simulations in ns-2 with real world data) of disconnection tolerant data forwarding, our results show that source routing can be extended to improve its performance in disconnected environments.