SHARE: Scalable hybrid adaptive routing for dynamic multi-hop environments

No longer are wireless networks isolated islands: now devices in one network may communicate with devices in other networks. But as the density of devices increases and the range of wireless transmissions decreases, there is a critical need for scalable multi-hop wireless networking. In this paper, we propose SHARE, a novel approach to scalable multi-hop routing for wireless networks. SHARE is a hybrid of gradient routing, locally scoped link-state routing, multiple-path braid forwarding, and flooding. SHARE adapts the amount of control traffic and the amount of data traffic according to data traffic patterns and network dynamics to maximize network scalability and robustness while minimizing control overhead. We evaluate a real-world implementation of SHARE in ns-3 using Direct Code Execution (DCE), and compare SHARE against a DCE version of the optimized link state routing protocol (OLSR) for a static grid and for the Gauss-Markov mobility model. We show that SHARE is able to deliver up to 31 % more data packets than OLSR across a range of network sizes and speeds, while reducing overhead by a factor of 7x.