Circular sailing routing for wireless networks

Routing in wireless networks has been heavily studied in the last decade and numerous routing protocols were proposed in literature. The packets usually follow the shortest paths between sources and destinations in routing protocols to achieve smallest traveled distance. However, this leads to the uneven distribution of traffic load in a network. For example, wireless nodes in the center of the network will have heavier traffic since most of the shortest routes go through them. In this paper, we first describe a novel routing method, called Circular Sailing Routing (CSR), which can distribute the traffic more evenly in the network. The proposed method first maps the network onto a sphere via a simple stereographic projection, and then the route decision is made by the distance on the sphere instead of the Euclidean distance in the plane. We theoretically prove that for a network the distance traveled by the packets using CSR is no more than a small constant factor of the minimum (the distance of the shortest path). We then extend CSR to a localized version, Localized CSR, by modifying the greedy routing without any additional communication overhead. Finally, we further propose CSR protocols for 3D networks where nodes are distributed in a 3D space instead of a 2D plane. For all proposed methods, we conduct simulations to study their performances and compare them with global shortest path routing or greedy routing.