Virtual Trellis Routing: how Regular Structures can ease Network Layer operations

The main characteristic of Ad Hoc and Sensor networks (the dynamic presence of nodes without any existing infrastructure) implies that the topological information contained in the IP address can no longer reflect the position of a node in the network. Many solutions are being proposed to improve classical routing but they seldom scale in such environments. This paper proposes a new approach to revise the location-identification couple contained in the IP address. We propose the use of a Virtual Regular Structure as a topological location space to address the desired properties such as robustness or multi-paths. Our approach explores an implementation based on trellis graphs in place of trees. We show that the construction of the optimal structure is an NP-Complete problem, but propose a heuristic and evaluate its performance via simulations. We also analyze the robustness of the proposed approach with regards to the transient presence of nodes.