Transmission-Efficient Routing in Wireless Networks Using Link-State Information

The efficiency with which the routing protocol of a multihop packet-radio network uses transmission bandwidth is critical to the ability of the network nodes to conserve energy. We present and verify the source-tree adaptive routing (STAR) protocol, which we show through simulation experiments to be far more efficient than both table-driven and on-demand routing protocols proposed for wireless networks in the recent past. A router in STAR communicates to its neighbors the parameters of its source routing tree, which consists of each link that the router needs to reach every destination. To conserve transmission bandwidth and energy, a router transmits changes to its source routing tree only when the router detects new destinations, the possibility of looping, or the possibility of node failures or network partitions. Simulation results show that STAR is an order of magnitude more efficient than any topology-broadcast protocol proposed to date and depending on the scenario is up to six times more efficient than the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol, which has been shown to be one of the best performing on-demand routing protocols.