Gossiping along the Path: A Direction-Biased Routing Scheme for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Like any communication networks, Wireless ad hoc networks (WANETs) require routing to support many applications such as data aggregation and over-the- air firmware update. Traditional route discovery in WANETs floods request all over the network causing broadcast storm that will heavily consume the precious power resources on nodes. To respond, gossip routing is proposed to reduce the number of messages. In recent years, several algorithms have been developed to improve its efficiency using location information. However, they only make use of distance but not directional information which is much cheaper to acquire in WANETs. In this paper, we develop an approach to improve location- aided routing by making use of directional information, with and without distance information. Empirical results show that our approach outperforms existing gossip routing algorithms, including location-aided ones, on random and deployed WSNs. When only general direction information of nodes is given, performances of our algorithms only drop slightly. Hoping this approach can also benefit other types of routing tasks, we also migrate the spirit of this algorithm onto opportunistic routing and show improved performance than existing location-aided opportunistic routing.