Designing a Simulation Application for Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

A wireless ad-hoc network is a self-configuring network that does not depend on any infrastructure for communication. Every node is free to move anywhere in the network and data is exchanged independently across the network. Destruction of one node does not affect the communication of other nodes in the network. Every node in the network can act as both host as well as destination. A wireless ad-hoc network does not rely on fixed infrastructure or predetermined connectivity. It is a self organizing multi-hop wireless network in which all of the nodes can be mobile. Data is exchanged between nodes via wireless communication. Aside from the ability to be rapidly deployed, wireless ad-hoc networks have the ability to exist in highly volatile environments. Unlike traditional networks, if one node is destroyed it will not impact the data exchange between the remaining nodes within the network. Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR), a novel routing protocol for wireless datagram networks that uses the positions of routers and a packet’s destination to make packet forwarding decisions. GPSR makes greedy forwarding decisions using only information about a router’s immediate neighbours in the network topology. When a packet reaches a region where greedy forwarding is impossible, the algorithm recovers by routing around the perimeter of the region. By keeping state only about the local topology, GPSR scales better in per-router state than shortest-path and ad-hoc routing protocols as the number of network destinations increases. Under mobility’s frequent topology changes, GPSR can use local topology information to find correct new routes quickly. We describe the GPSR protocol, and use extensive simulation of mobile wireless networks to compare its performance with that of Dynamic Source Routing. Our simulations demonstrate GPSR’s scalability on densely deployed wireless networks.