Randomized 3D Geographic Routing

We reconsider the problem of geographic routing in wireless ad hoc networks. We are interested in local, memoryless routing algorithms, i.e. each network node bases its routing decision solely on its local view of the network, nodes do not store any message state, and the message itself can only carry information about O(1) nodes. In geographic routing schemes, each network node is assumed to know the coordinates of itself and all adjacent nodes, and each message carries the coordinates of its target. Whereas many of the aspects of geographic routing have already been solved for 2D networks, little is known about higher-dimensional networks. It has been shown only recently that there is in fact no local memoryless routing algorithm for 3D networks that delivers messages deterministically. In this paper, we show that a cubic routing stretch constitutes a lower bound for any local memoryless routing algorithm, and propose and analyze several randomized geographic routing algorithms which work well for 3D network topologies. For unit ball graphs, we present a technique to locally capture the surface of holes in the network, which leads to 3D routing algorithms similar to the greedy-face-greedy approach for 2D networks.