Routing for Diverse Wireless Networks

Our work is motivated by a simple question: can we design a simple routing protocol that works well across diverse wireless network environments such as meshes, MANETs, and DTNs? We identify packet replication as a key structural difference between protocols designed for opposite ends of the connectivity spectrum, namely, DTNs and meshes. We develop a model to quantify under what conditions and by how much replication improves packet delays, and use these insights to drive the design of ReGain, a routing protocol that self-adapts replication to the extent of connectivity in network conditions. We implement ReGain and evaluate its performance through deployment over a mesh testbed and trace-driven evaluations on real network testbeds exhibiting diverse connectivity. Our results show that ReGain achieves up to 2× better delay and 1.3× better goodput over existing protocols in a variety of network connectivity and load conditions.