Routing Efficiency of Infrastructureless Networks: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to analyse the traffic efficiency of infrastructureless networks. Wireless communication is rapidly moving towards more infrastructureless routing schemes, where the devices encounter frequent topology changes and communicate with each other anonymously and sporadically. Nodes do not have the opportunity to choose an optimum routing path, they do rather obtain a valid routing path on the fly during the data exchange by cooperating with the nearest neighbours. Packets emanated from an infrastructureless node are disseminated through each node found in the vicinity. This produces a vast number of packet duplicates within the entire communication environment, causing the problem of increased congestion, increased packet delay, more packet drops, and undesirable energy consumption compared to the infrastructured networks. Data exchange and packet routing operations in large networks are highly stochastic. Thus, the performance analysis of routing operations is modeled as a stochastic queueing system, where the input and output traffics and throughput operations of routing systems are precisely formulated in the form of stochastic processes. A hypothetical routing algorithm is also defined here as a reference model in order to perform a comparative analysis of the infrastructureless routing scheme.

Keywords

• Ad-hoc routing
• collaborative routing
• energy sustainability
• infrastructureless networks
• routing optimization