HOME: hotspot mesh architecture for efficient routing in large ad hoc wireless networks

The efficiency of routing schemes in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) depends significantly on the number of forwarding hosts for propagating route discovery requests and data packets. In this paper, two approaches are proposed to minimize the number of forwarding hosts. First, a distributed topology formation algorithm called hotspot-mesh is presented to turn the physical network into mesh-like backbone infrastructure based on a connected dominating set (CDS) of the network. Then we propose to extend hotspot-mesh by utilizing location information obtained from Global Positioning System to restrict the route search within a smaller search region. The network traffic can be further minimized at the cost of slightly more storage and computing overhead for selecting forwarding hosts. Moreover, there is no extra message needed compared with related schemes. Our simulation results show that the proposed approaches outperform several related schemes in terms of total number of network control packets