Rendezvous-based directional routing: A performance analysis

The increased usage of directional methods of communications to improve medium reuse, network capacity, and bandwidth has prompted research into leveraging directionality in every layer of the network stack. Recently, there has been work on bringing the apparent capacity gains on layer 2 using directional communications methods to layer 3 by using directionality to route packets scalably in unstructured, flat networks. In their protocol, Orthogonal Rendezvous Routing Protocol, Cheng et al. [1] showed that by ”drawing” two lines orthogonal to each other at each node, it is possible to provide over 98% connectivity while maintaining only O(N^3/2) evenly distributed states at a cost of only 1.2 path stretch. In this paper, we seek to provide more in-depth performance analysis by tuning additional factors such as the number of directions to transmit, the number of interfaces per node, among others, to understand its affect on varying network densities, topologies, connections, and traffic patterns. We show that by sending packets out in more directions, increased connectivity, smaller average path length, better goodput results only up to a point as compared to other routing protocols. The trade-off, however, is added state information maintained at each node and additional control packets received. We also show that the addition of more interfaces generally yields better packet delivery success, average path length, and goodput.