A low overhead routing protocol for ad hoc networks with global connectivity

When ad hoc networks are linked to wired networks by access points, the traffic tends to be non-uniformly distributed in the sense that it is more likely to be concentrated on the access points than on other nodes. However, most traditional schemes of ad hoc routing focus on the pure ad hoc network with a uniform traffic pattern. The purpose of this paper is to build multi-hop routes for non-uniform route connectivity with low routing overhead. To achieve efficient route discovery and route maintenance, we develop a new routing scheme of hopcount-based routing, which utilizes hopcount information to localize the route discovery within a limited area in order to reduce routing overhead. The simulation results show that the hopcount-based routing scheme highly reduces routing overhead while preserving high rate of successfully discovering route to the destination.