Load Balancing Routing with Bounded Stretch

Routing in wireless networks has been heavily studied in the last decade. Many routing protocols are based on classic shortest path algorithms. However, shortest path-based routing protocols suffer from uneven load distribution in the network, such as crowed center effect where the center nodes have more load than the nodes in the periphery. Aiming to balance the load, we propose a novel routing method, called Circular Sailing Routing (CSR), which can distribute the traffic more evenly in the network. The proposed method first maps the network onto a sphere via a simple stereographic projection, and then the route decision is made by a newly defined “circular distance” on the sphere instead of the Euclidean distance in the plane. We theoretically prove that for a network, the distance traveled by the packets using CSR is no more than a small constant factor of the minimum (the distance of the shortest path). We also extend CSR to a localized version, Localized CSR, by modifying greedy routing without any additional communication overhead. In addition, we investigate how to design CSR routing for 3D networks. For all proposed methods, we conduct extensive simulations to study their performances and compare them with global shortest path routing or greedy routing in 2D and 3D wireless networks.