A survey on routing algorithms for wireless Ad-Hoc and mesh networks

Wireless networking technology is evolving as an inexpensive alternative for building federated and community networks (relative to the traditional wired networking approach). Besides its cost-effectiveness, a wireless network brings operational efficiencies, namely mobility and untethered convenience to the end user. A wireless network can operate in both the Ad-Hoc mode, where users are self-managed, and the Infrastructure mode, where an authority manages the network with some Infrastructure such as fixed wireless routers, base stations, access points, etc. An Ad-Hoc network generally supports multi-hopping, where a data packet may travel over multiple hops to reach its destination. Among the Infrastructure-based networks, a Wireless Mesh Network (with a set of wireless routers located at strategic points to provide overall network connectivity) also provides the flexibility of multi-hopping. Therefore, how to route packets efficiently in wireless networks is a very important problem. A variety of wireless routing solutions have been proposed in the literature. This paper presents a survey of the routing algorithms proposed for wireless networks. Unlike routing in a wired network, wireless routing introduces new paradigms and challenges such as interference from other transmissions, varying channel characteristics, etc. In a wireless network, routing algorithms are classified into various categories such as Geographical, Geo-casting, Hierarchical, Multi-path, Power-aware, and Hybrid routing algorithms. Due to the large number of surveys that study different routing-algorithm categories, we select a limited but representative number of these surveys to be reviewed in our work. This survey offers a comprehensive review of these categories of routing algorithms. In the early stages of development of wireless networks, basic routing algorithms, such as Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Ad-Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing, were designed to control traffic on the network. However, it was found that applying these basic routing algorithms directly on wireless networks could lead to some issues such as large area of flooding, Greedy Forwarding empty set of neighbors, flat addressing, widely-distributed information, large power consumption, interference, and load-balancing problems. Therefore, a number of routing algorithms have been proposed as extensions to these basic routing algorithms to enhance their performance in wireless networks. Hence, we study the features of routing algorithms, which are compatible with the wireless environment and which can overcome these problems. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.