GHVR: One-to-One Gradient-Height Vector Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper addresses the problem of routing packets between any nodes in a wireless mesh network (WMN) equipped with a set of reference landmarks. These reference landmarks are pre-selected Internet gateways or special nodes that broadcast beacon messages periodically. WMN nodes are then assigned multiple gradient-based coordinates, which are heights relative to the landmarks. These multiple heights of each node are treated as if they were the actual multi-dimensional geographic locations of that node. The proposed routing protocol, called GHVR, runs geographic routing with these multi-dimensional geographic locations. Unlike other similar approaches that use discrete hop counts to the landmarks, GHVR uses continuous heights expressed in real numbers. Our ns-2 simulation results demonstrate that GHVR requires fewer landmarks and improves routing performance by almost a factor of 2 over that of using the discrete hop-count coordinate.