Global state routing: a new routing scheme for ad-hoc wireless networks

In an ad-hoc environment with no wired communication infrastructure, it is necessary that mobile hosts operate as routers in order to maintain the information about connectivity. However with the presence of high mobility and low signal/interference ratio (SIR), traditional routing schemes for wired networks are not appropriate, as they either lack the ability to quickly reflect the changing topology, or may cause excessive overhead, which degrades network performance. Considering these restrictions, we propose a new scheme especially designed for routing in an ad-hoc wireless environments. We call this scheme “global state routing” (GSR), where nodes exchange vectors of link states among their neighbors during routing information exchange. Based on the link state vectors, nodes maintain a global knowledge of the network topology and optimize their routing decisions locally. The performance of the algorithm, studied in this paper through a series of simulations, reveals that this scheme provides a better solution than existing approaches in a truly mobile, ad-hoc environment