Minimizing multi-hop wireless routing state under application-based accuracy constraints

Provisioning of rich routing building blocks to mobile ad-hoc networking applications has been of high interest. Several MANET applications need flexibility in describing paths their traffic will follow. To accommodate this need, previous work has proposed several viable routing schemes such as Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Trajectory-Based Routing (TBR). However, tradeoffs involved in the interaction of these routing schemes and the application-specific requirements have not been explored. Especially, techniques to help the application to do the right routing choices are much needed. We consider techniques that minimize routing protocol state costs under application-based constraints. We study the constraint of ldquoaccuracyrdquo of the applicationpsilas desired route, as this constraint provides a range of choices to the applications. As a crucial part of this optimization framework, we investigate the tradeoff between the packet header size and the network state. We, then, apply our framework to the case of TBR with application-based accuracy constraints in obeying a given trajectory. We begin with simple discrete models to clarify the tradeoff between packet header size and network state. We show that the problem of accurate representation of a trajectory with the objective of minimizing the cost incurred due to header size and network state is difficult to solve optimally. Finally, we develop heuristics solving this problem and illustrate their performance.