Distributed construction of a planar spanner and routing for ad hoc wireless networks

Several localized routing protocols (see Bose, P. and Morin, P., Proc. 10th Annual Int. Symp. on Algorithms and Computation ISAAC, 1999) guarantee the delivery of packets when the underlying network topology is the Delaunay triangulation of all wireless nodes. However, it is expensive to construct the Delaunay triangulation in a distributed manner. Given a set of wireless nodes, we more accurately model the network as a unit-disk graph, UDG, in which a link between two nodes exists only if the distance between them is at most the maximum transmission range. Given a graph H, a spanning subgraph G of H is a t-spanner if the length of the shortest path connecting any two points in G is no more than t times the length of the shortest path connecting the two points in H. We present a novel localized networking protocol that constructs a planar 2.5-spanner of UDG, called the localized Delaunay triangulation, as network topology. It contains all edges that are in both the UDG and the Delaunay triangulation of all wireless nodes. Our experiments show that the delivery rates of existing localized routing protocols are increased when localized Delaunay triangulation is used instead of several previously proposed topologies. The total communication cost of our networking protocol is O(n log n) bits. Moreover, the computation cost of each node u is O(d_u log d_u), where d_u is the number of 1-hop neighbors of u in UDG.