Area Avoidance Routing in Distance-Vector Networks

Network routing may be required, under certain applications, to avoid certain areas (or nodes). These areas can be of potential security threat, possess poor quality or have other undesired characteristics. Thus, protocols that can perform area avoidance routing can be beneficial for many objectives. Such routing is particularly challenging in distance-vector networks, where only the shortest-distance information is available to the nodes. We address this challenge by algorithms that retrieve distance-vector information from other nodes in the network, referred to as reference nodes, and exploit it for computing guaranteed area-avoiding paths. Having these paths, the source can direct the packets using loose source routing towards the destination. We lay out the model for area avoidance routing and study several algorithms for calculating area-avoiding paths. In addition, we address the problem of dynamically selecting reference nodes. We show, through analysis and extensive simulation, that in many cases a small number of reference nodes are sufficient for area avoidance routing.