Small world routing: a methodological framework for driving the emerging topology of energy-constrained multi-hop wireless networks

A small world topology may result in particularly appealing features for wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks, thanks to its combination of high local connectivity and of short distance between terminals. In this work we propose a routing strategy aiming at driving the network topology of energy-constrained ad-hoc networks towards small worlds by combining short and long distance links in the end-to-end paths. Results of simulations show that the proposed strategy does lead to the desired topology, and allows excellent network performance in comparison with strategies leading to different network topologies.