Spatially Diffuse Pathsets for Robust Routing in Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc wireless networks are characterized by frequent node mobility, limited power reserves and interfering transmissions. On-demand routing proves to be more successful in such networks, as it reduces the traffic overhead of sending periodic updates, but they may be susceptible to both random uncertainty in radio links, and malicious jamming. We consider a network of nodes addressed by their locations, and propose a novel routing technique that we call Petal Routing, which maximizes reliability by using pathsets, made of diverse multiple paths, in place of a single path. Petal Routing takes advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless networks to reduce the number of transmissions for multiple paths by overlapping the multiple diverse paths. Various tunable parameters built into the approach can be used to improve metrics such as delay, number of transmissions and packet delivery ratio. We evaluate the performance of our scheme using extensive simulations, and show that it is viable.