Balancing traffic load in wireless networks with curveball routing

We address the problem of balancing the traffic load in multi-hop wireless networks. We consider a point-to-point communicating network with a uniform distribution of source-sink pairs. When routing along shortest paths, the nodes that are centrally located forward a disproportionate amount of traffic. This translates into increased congestion and energy consumption. However, the maximum load can be decreased if the packets follow curved paths. We show that the optimum such routing scheme can be expressed in terms of geometric optics and computed by linear programming. We then propose a practical solution, which we call Curveball Routing that achieves results not much worse than the optimum. We evaluate our solution at three levels of fidelity: a Java high-level simulator, the ns2 simulator, and the Intel Mirage Sensor Network Testbed. Simulation results using the high-level simulator show that our solution successfully avoids the crowded center of the network, and reduces the maximum...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: MOBIHOC
• Authors: Lucian Popa 0002, Afshin Rostamizadeh, Richard M. Karp, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Ion Stoica
• Keywords: Maximum Load, MOBIHOC 2007, Multi-hop Wireless Networks, Peak Message Load, Wireless Networks