Wide Area Cartesian Routing

Cartesian routing is a fast packet routing mechanism intended for geographic addresses and can effectively accelerate the packet routing process within a local or metropolitan environment. The wide area Cartesian routing described in this paper is an extension of the Cartesian routing algorithms designed to make the exchange of internetwork packets between geographical regions possible. It also introduces a new hierarchical structure for the entire Internet. The proposed Internet is viewed as a hierarchy of networks consisting of routers. At the highest level of this hierarchy, major routers exchange packets between large geopolitical areas such as countries, states, or provinces. At the lowest level of the structure, packets are routed between local routers in small geographical regions ranging from an office to a small town. There are only four layers in this structure and at each layer Cartesian routing is employed to send packets from the source router to the destination.