Geographical cluster based multihop ad hoc network routing with guaranteed delivery

Exploring the faces of a planar graph is a prominent approach to recover from routing failures which may occur during geographic greedy forwarding heuristics applied in multihop ad hoc networks. A recently studied variant of planar graph based recovery, termed geographical cluster based routing, performs face exploration along the edges of an overlay graph instead of using the network links directly. For this routing variant it has been observed, that there exist node placements which result in a connected physical network while any planar overlay graph which is constructed by simply removing edges from that graph is disconnected. This article for the first time describes a technique to locally construct an overlay graph which is both planar and connected. In addition we present a generic routing framework which is based on the overlay graph introduced in this work. In contrast to existing planar graph routing techniques the described framework allows major flexibility regarding the possible next hop candidate nodes. The framework is envisioned to serve as an interesting starting point for future performance measurements of a multitude of its possible instances