Node-centric hybrid routing for ad-hoc wireless extensions of the Internet

We present node-centric approaches to hybrid routing for ad hoc networks in which normal nodes are distinguished from special nodes, called netmarks, hosting popular network services or functioning as points of attachment to the Internet. With node-centric hybrid routing, netmarks force other common nodes to maintain routing information for them by advertising their routing information as in table-driven routing protocols. This reduces the network-wide flooding and the corresponding delay for route set up every time a session needs to be established between a normal node and a netmark. Routes between peer nodes are set up on-demand. A node-centric routing solution is presented based on partial link state information. In this solution, table-driven routing is maintained for netmarks and on-demand routing is supported for common nodes. Simulation results using ns2 show that this approach performs much better than such on-demand routing protocols as DSR, AODV, and SOAR.