Scalable routing in hybrid cellular and ad-hoc networks

As wireless ad-hoc networking approaches its maturity, an architecture that can support the massive deployment of such networks has not been established. Hybrid networks are a promising architecture that builds ad hoc wireless networks around the existing cellular telephony infrastructure. We present a routing protocol (DST) for hybrid networks that maintains a close to optimal spanning tree of the network with the use of distributed topology trees. DST is fully dynamic and generates only O(log n) messages per update operation. We demonstrate experimentally that the performance of DST scales excellently with the network size and activity, making it ideal for the metropolitan environment hybrid networks are expected to operate in.