Building Ring-Like Overlays on Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

Many applications in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks involve only a subset of nodes in the network. A common practice is to form an overlay, such as a mesh or tree, to link the member nodes together. In this paper, we propose two novel distributed approaches for constructing ring-like overlays for static, random ad hoc and sensor networks. A ring-like overlay is a relaxed, unidirectional ring structure, with side paths or loops. Such a structure may be sufficient for global operations such as reliable file multicast, congestion control, and clock synchronization. We evaluate the resultant ring-like overlays by simulation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to construct a ring-like overlay on random ad hoc and sensor networks using a distributed approach