Mercury-like routing for high mobility wireless ad hoc networks

Supporting high mobility is essential to mobile ad hoc networks in a wide range of emerging applications such as vehicular networks. Communication links of an established communication path that extends between source and destination nodes are often broken under a high mobility environment. Although a new communication route can be established when a break in the communication path occurs, repeatedly reestablishing new routes incurs delay and substantial overhead. To address this limitation, we introduce the Communication Path abstraction in this paper. A communication path is a dynamically-created geographical area that connects the source and destination nodes. The routing functionality of a communication path is provided by the physical nodes (i.e., mobile devices) currently within the geographical region served by the path. These physical nodes take turns in forwarding data packets for the path. Since a path can be supported by many alternative nodes, this scheme is much less susceptible to node mobility. Our simulation results show the Communication Path approach can achieve several times better performance than traditional approach based on a fixed sequence of physical links.