Routeless Routing and MAC-Aided Protocols for Adhoc Wireless Network: Controlled Flooding, MAC-Assisted Topology Control and Broadcasting

The focus of this book is ad hoc wireless networks. A correct efficient operation of such networks depends on the interaction of several protocols dealing with routing, medium access control, power control and many other issues. This book is primarily concerned with the development and evaluation of such protocols. It is shown how flooding can be adopted as a reliable and efficient routing scheme in ad hoc wireless networks. It turns out that, with the assistance of some tunable heuristics, flooding is not necessarily inferior to sophisticated point-to-point forwarding schemes. A broadcast-based route-less routing protocol is developed in which flooding exhibits a tendency to converge on a narrow strip of nodes along the shortest path. A MAC-assisted minimum-energy path- preserving topology control algorithm is also devised to maintain connectivity using minimal power. Routing protocols use another important service called 'broadcasting' for different purposes. By adjusting the stochastic component of the popular class of contention resolution schemes based on IEEE 802.11, a broadcast scheme is devised to significantly reduce broadcast latency.