A Distributed Three-hop Routing Protocol to Increase the Capacity of Hybrid Networks

Hybrid wireless networks combining the advantages of both ad-hoc networks and infrastructure wireless networks have been receiving increasingly attentions because of their ultra-high performance. An efficient data routing protocol is an important component in such networks for high capacity and scalability. However, most routing protocols for the networks simply combine an ad-hoc transmission mode and a cellular transmission mode, which fail to take advantage of the dual-feature architecture. This paper presents a distributed Three-hop Routing (DTR) protocol for hybrid wireless networks. DTR divides a message data stream into segments and transmits the segments in a distributed manner. It makes full spatial reuse of system via high speed ad-hoc interface and alleviate mobile gateway congestion via cellular interface. Furthermore, sending segments to a number of base stations simultaneously increases the throughput, and makes full use of wide-spread base stations. In addition, DTR significantly reduces overhead due to short path length and eliminates route discovery and maintenance overhead. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show the superiority of DTR in comparison with other routing protocols in terms of throughput capacity, scalability and mobility resilience.