LIBR: ID-based routing for linear Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper proposes LIBR, a routing protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks specially designed for linear topologies, i.e., topologies in which nodes are placed following a well-defined line-based pattern. This kind of topology may arise, for example, in power transmission lines, pipelines, roads, and railway lines. By exploring the intrinsic characteristics of these linear topologies, LIBR can achieve good performance and scalability, while being simple and incurring in low overhead for the network. Even employing a heuristic next hop selection procedure, in our simulation results, we found that LIBR was able improve network goodput in typical linear topologies up to 22%, when compared to traditional ad hoc routing protocols. Our analysis suggests that this improvement comes from a number of reasons, including better sharing of network resources (such as nodes´ queues and the wireless medium itself). Finally, due to its heuristic nature, LIBR results in lower levels of control overhead, increasing the network energetic efficiency in 14% in our simulations.