Greedy Distance Vector Routing

Greedy Distance Vector (GDV) is the first geographic routing protocol designed to optimize end-to-end path costs using any additive routing metric, such as: hop count, latency, ETX, ETT, etc. GDV requires no node location information. Instead, GDV uses estimated routing costs to destinations which are locally computed from node positions in a virtual space. GDV makes use of VPoD, a new virtual positioning protocol for wireless networks. Prior virtual positioning systems (e.g., Vivaldi and GNP) were designed for Internet hosts and require that each host measures latencies (routing costs) to distant hosts or landmarks. VPoD does not have this requirement and uses only routing costs between directly connected nodes. Experimental results show that the routing performance of GDV is better than prior geographic routing protocols when hop count is used as metric and much better when ETX is used as metric. As a geographic protocol, the storage cost of GDV per node remains low as network size increases. GDV provides guaranteed delivery for nodes placed in 2D, 3D, and higher dimensions. We also show that GDV and VPoD are highly resilient to dynamic topology changes.