Taking ad-hoc literally: route-less routing in practical, small-footprint, ad-hoc wireless networks

We discuss a complete, efficient, effective, and practically verified platform for rapidly developing and deploying adhoc wireless networks consisting of hundreds to thousands of inexpensive nodes. We demonstrate how, with the assistance of some self-tunable heuristics, flooding can be tamed and turned into a highly efficient and robust forwarding scheme, in which the resources needed to sustain a session tend to converge to a narrow strip of nodes along the “best” path between source and destination. Our resultant scheme is easily and automatically scalable to devices with drastically different footprint, including ones with less than 1KB of RAM. We also introduce a novel programming environment, including an operating system, for implementing layer-less multithreaded embedded networking software on devices with a wide range of footprints.