Regional Gossip Routing for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Many routing protocols have been proposed for wireless ad hoc networks, and most of them are based on some variants of flooding. Thus many routing messages are propagated through the network unnecessarily despite various optimizations. Gossip based routing method has been used and re-investigated to reduce the number of messages in both wired networks and wireless ad hoc networks. However, the global gossiping still generates many unnecessary messages in the area that could be far away from the line between sender node and receiver node. We propose a regional gossip approach, where only the nodes within some region forward a message with some probability, to reduce the overhead of the route discovery in the network. We show how to set the forwarding probability based on the region and the network density both by theoretical analysis and by extensive simulations. Our simulations show that the number of messages generated using this approach is much less than the simple global gossiping method, which already saves many messages compared with global flooding. We expect that the improvement should be even more significant in larger networks