Source Routing Made Practical in Embedded Networks

Reducing packet latency is an important requirement in embedded networks. Source routing can be used to reduce processing delay at intermediate nodes and thereby reduce the overall packet latency. However source routing is not scalable which makes it unsuitable for larger networks. The addition of the source route to every packet reduces the system good put (application level throughput). Further, source routes ignore dynamic network conditions which might lead to routing failures. In this paper, we propose strategies to counter these problems. We propose a topology encoding scheme that reduces the overhead and makes source routing scalable. We propose a lazy correction scheme that makes it take cognizance of dynamic network conditions. Through simulations on reasonably large sized network with realistic models for traffic and failure, we show that source routing is indeed usable in practical scenarios.