Greedy routing in wireless mesh network: Performance and analysis

Uniform random network (URN) is perhaps the most basic and generic model of complex networks. In a URN, each node links to exactly k other nodes which are randomly chosen from the entire network with equal probability. With such a simple topology assumption, URN is suitable for modeling homogeneous wireless mesh networks. However, compared to inhomogeneous networks like small world or power-law network, the routing performance of URNs has been less investigated. For small world, it is widely known that a message can be expected to reach its destination through averagely 6 hops. But how many hops for URNs? In this paper, we try to evaluate the performance of URN routing through discrete-event simulation, which reveals two interesting and surprising findings: (1) most routings in URNs end up with incorrect destinations after one or two hops; (2) given a key, the diversity of all possible routing results closely approximates to N/k, where N is the network size and k is the outgoing degree. Tuning of these two parameters does not change above observations.