Routing and Traversal via Location Awareness in Ad Hoc Networks

We survey some recent results that make use of location awareness of the hosts of an ad-hoc network in order to provide for efficient information dissemination. We explore several new methodologies for constructing hopand geometric-spanners in a distributed manner, discuss advantages and disadvantages of preprocessing the network topology, and outline several algorithms for efficient traversal and route discovery in ad-hoc networks. 1 Challenges in Ad-Hoc Networking The current rapid growth in the spread of wireless devices of ever increasing miniaturization and computing power has greatly influenced the development of ad-hoc networking. Ad-hoc networks are wireless, self-organizing systems formed by co-operating nodes within communication range of each other that form temporary networks with a dynamic decentralized topology. It is desired to make a variety of services available (e.g., internet, GPS, service discovery) in such environments and our expectation is for a seamless and ubiquitous integration of the new wireless devices with the existing wired communication infrastructure. At the same time we anticipate the development of new wireless services that will provide solutions to a variety of communication School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, K1S 5B6, Canada. Department of Mathematics, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, V5A 1S6.