Getting things straight - comparing ISPRP to linearization

Protocols such as Virtual Ring Routing (VRR) and Scalable Source Routing (SSR) provide DHT-inspired routing directly in the network layer. Being cross-layer approaches, they are expected to have a low control message overhead, which is important especially for wireless ad hoc networks. Both, VRR and SSR establish a virtual ring that links nodes in the address space. Establishing and maintaining this ring accounts for the major fraction of the protocols' control message overhead. In this paper, we consider theoretical results on graph linearization to seek a further improvement of the ring maintenance protocols. To this end, we re-investigate SSR's original ISPRP mechanism and compare it to the more recent linearization approach. Our results show that linearization converges more quickly. It also leads to significantly shorter source routes between ring neighbors. On the other hand, ISPRP is slightly more robust and needs less state on the nodes.