Position-based Routing using Virtual Small World in MANETs

Routing is the foremost issue in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In a wireless environment characterized by small bandwidth and limited computation resources, position-based routing is attractive because it requires little communication and storage overhead. To guarantee delivery and improve performance, most position-based routing protocols, e. g. GFG, forward a message in greedy mode until the message is forwarded to a node that has no neighbor closer to the destination. They then switch to a less efficient mode. Face routing, where the message is forwarded along the perimeter of the void, is one example. This paper tackles the void problem from a different angle. We construct a virtual small world network by adding virtual long links to reduce the chance of a protocol encountering local minima in greedy mode, and thus decrease the chance to invoke inefficient methods. Experiments show that this method effectively improves the performance of the greedy-face combinations in terms of average hop count.