A case for packet deflection in structured wireless topologies

We promote the idea of deflecting packets in a structured wireless mesh deployment. In any wireless network, upon arrival of new packets when the sources and destinations are selected uniformly the majority of traffic goes through the center of the network, while the edges are underutilized. This situation becomes more apparent in a structured mesh deployment. We demonstrate that the throughput could be improved by deflecting packets away from the congested part of the network and towards the underutilized parts. We develop a simple routing protocol that allows network nodes to deflect packets. We demonstrate that the performance of deflection routing improves as the network size increases. Our extensive simulations show that despite of its simplicity deflection routing not only outperforms conventional shortest path routing but newly developed and complex opportunistic routing mechanisms as well. Our simulations show that for a moderate size network, deflection routing gives 51% higher throughput than the conventional routing mechanism, when a newly arrived packet selects its source and destination uniformly.