Subarea Tree Routing in Multi-hop Wireless Ad hoc Networks

We propose Subarea Tree Routing (STR), a new routing protocol for multi-hop wireless Ad hoc networks. The novelty of the STR protocol is to divide the whole network into many subareas constructed as a result of establishing subarea trees. Its main idea is to identify root nodes by manual configuration or auto-discovery process firstly, then the root nodes originate the process of establishing subarea trees, and finally each node either joins in a subarea tree or become an interconnect node. STR belongs to hierarchical routing protocol and does not attempt to consistently maintain routing information in every node. Furthermore, through the use of tree's intrinsic routing function, the STR protocol exhibits hybrid behavior of proactive and on-demand routing protocols. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves lower route discovery delays, lower route discovery load and better performance of normalized routing load in large, mobile, ad hoc networks as compared with AODV.