A self-organizing routing scheme for random networks

Abstract

Most routing protocols employ address aggregation to achieve scalability with respect to routing table size. But often, as networks grow in size and complexity, address aggregation fails. Other networks, e.g. sensor-actuator networks or ad-hoc networks, that are characterized by "organic growth" might not at all follow the classical hierarchical structures that are required for aggregation. In this paper, we present a fully self-organizing routing scheme that is able to efficiently route messages in random networks with randomly assigned node addresses. The protocol combines peer-to-peer techniques with source routing and can be implemented to work with very limited resource demands. With the help of simulations we show that it nevertheless quickly converges into a globally consistent state and achieves a routing stretch of only 1.2 - 1.3 in a network with more than 105 randomly assigned nodes. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.