An E cient Routing Protocol for Wireless Networks

We present the wireless routing protocol WRP. In WRP, routing nodes communicate the distance and second-to-last hop for each destination. WRP reduces the number of cases in which a temporary routing loop can occur, which accounts for its fast convergence properties. A detailed proof of correctness is presented and its performance is compared by simulation with the performance of the distributed Bellman-Ford algorithm DBF, DUAL a loop-free distance-vector algorithm and an ideal link-state algorithm ILS, which represent the state of the art of internet routing. The simulation results indicate that WRP is the most eecient of the alternatives analyzed. The routing protocols used in multihop packet-radio networks implemented in the past 2,3,11were based on shortest-path routing algorithms that have been typically based on the distributed Bellman-Ford algorithm DBF 4. According to DBF, a routing node knows the length of the shortest path from each neighbor to every network destination and this information is used to compute the shortest path and successor in the path to each destination. An update message contains a vector of one or more entries, each of which speciies as a minimum, the distance to a given destination. A major performance problem with DBF is that it takes a very long time to update the routing tables of network nodes after network partitions, node failures, or increase in network congestion. This performance problem of DBF stems from the fact that it has no inherent mechanism to determine when a network node should stop incrementing its distance to a given destination. This problem is usually called the counting-to-innnity problem. The counting-to-innnity problem is overcome in one of three ways in existing