Efficient route discovery in hybrid networks

Hybrid networks are formed by a combination of access points and mobile nodes such that the mobile nodes can communicate both through the access points and using ad-hoc networking among themselves. This work deals with providing efficient routing between mobile devices in hybrid networks. Specifically, we assume the existence of a spanning tree from each access point to all mobile devices within the transitive transmission range of the access point. We utilize this spanning tree to design a family of efficient point-to-point routing protocols for communication between the mobile devices themselves. The protocols utilize the tree structure in order to avoid expensive flooding of the entire network. The paper includes a detailed simulation study of several representative communication patterns, which compares our approaches to DSR.