PLASMA: A new routing paradigm for wireless multihop networks

In this paper we present a new routing paradigm for wireless multihop networks. In plasma routing, each packet is delivered over the best available path to one of the gateways. The choice of the path and gateway for each packet is not made beforehand by the source node, but rather on-the-fly by the mesh routers as the packet traverses the network. We propose a distributed routing algorithm to jointly optimize the transmission rate and the set of gateways each node should use. A load balancing technique is also proposed to disperse the network traffic among multiple gateways. We validate our proposal with simulations and show that plasma routing outperforms the state-of-the-art multirate anypath routing paradigm, with a 98% throughput gain and a 2.2x delay decrease. Finally, we also show that the load can be evenly distributed among gateways with a similar routing cost, resulting in a further 63% throughput gain.