Improving Routing Quality of Greedy Forwarding in Wireless Networks

In this paper, we reveal the inherent tradeoff between the quality of routing performance and the size of routing states in wireless networks. We suggest that the key approach to an optimal routing design is how to efficiently encode a network topology into small dimensional coordinates from which hop count distances between pairwise sensors can be accurately recovered. Based on the precisely hop count distance comparison, our proposed topology aware routing can assist the greedy forwarding to find the right neighbor that is one hop closer to the destination, and therefore achieve high success rate of packet delivery. The intensive performance evaluation shows that the topology aware routing can achieve routing performance comparable to the shortest path routing while preserving the routing states as small as location aware routing. Particularly, high routing success rate can be achieved in both concave environments where voids are presented and dynamic environments where nodes crash frequently.