Load Balancing Routing in Three Dimensional Wireless Networks

Although most existing wireless systems and protocols are based on two-dimensional design, in reality, a variety of networks operate in three-dimensions. The design of protocols for 3D networks is surprisingly more difficult than the design of those for 2D networks. In this paper, we investigate how to design load balancing routing for 3D networks. Most current wireless routing protocols are based on Shortest Path Routing (SPR), where packets are delivered along the shortest route from a source to a destination. However, under uniform communication, shortest path routing suffers from uneven load distribution in the network, such as crowed center effect where the center nodes have more load than the nodes in the periphery. Aim to balance the load, we propose a novel 3D routing method, called 3D Circular Sailing Routing (CSR), which maps the 3D network onto a sphere and routes the packets based on the spherical distance on the sphere. We describe two mapping methods for CSR and then provide theoretical proofs of their competitiveness compared to SPR. For both proposed methods, we conduct simulations to study their performance in grid and random networks.