Hierarchical Routing Over Dynamic Wireless Networks

The topology of a mobile wireless network changes over time. Maintaining routes between all nodes requires the continuous transmission of control information, which consumes precious power and bandwidth resources. Many routing protocols have been developed, trading off control overhead and route quality. In this paper, we ask whether there exist low-overhead schemes that produce low-stretch routes, even in large networks where all the nodes are mobile. We present a scheme that maintains a hierarchical structure within which constant-stretch routes can be efficiently computed between every pair of nodes. The scheme rebuilds each level of the hierarchy periodically, at a rate that decreases exponentially with the level of the hierarchy. We prove that this scheme achieves constant stretch under a mild smoothness condition on the nodal mobility processes. Furthermore, we prove tight bounds for the network-wide control overhead under the additional assumption of the connectivity graph forming a doubling metric space. Specifically, we show that for a connectivity model combining the random geometric graph with obstacles, constant-stretch routes can be maintained with a total overhead of n log2 n bits of control information per time unit.