Scalable Routing Strategies for Multi-Hop Ad-hoc Wireless Network

In this paper we consider a large population of mobile stations which are interconnected by a multihop wireless net. The applications of this wireless infrastructure range from ad hoc networking (eg, collaborative, distributed computing) to disaster recovery ((re, ood, earthquake), law enforcement (eg, crowd control), search and rescue and battleeeld. Key characteristics of this system are the large number of users, their mobility and the ability to operate without the support of a xed (wired or wireless) infrastructure. The last feature sets this system apart from existing cellular systems and in fact makes its design much more challenging. In this environment, we investigate routing strategies which scale well to large number and can handle mobility. In addition to large number and mobility, we address also the need to support multimedia communications, with low latency requirements for interactive traac and QoS support for real time streams (voice/video). In the wireless routing area, several schemes have already been proposed and implemented (eg, hierarchical routing, on-demand routing etc). We discuss the pro's and con's of the existing schemes, and introduce two new schemes-Fish-eye state routing (FSR) and Hierarchical State Routing (HSR)-which ooer some competitive advantages over the existing schemes. We compare the performance of existing and proposed schemes via simulation.