Robust position-based routing for wireless ad hoc networks

We consider a wireless ad hoc network composed of a set of wireless nodes distributed in a two dimensional plane. Several routing protocols based on the positions of the mobile hosts have been proposed in the literature. A typical assumption in these protocols is that all wireless nodes have uniform transmission regions modeled by unit disk centered at each wireless node. However, all these protocols are likely to fail if the transmission ranges of the mobile hosts vary due to natural or man-made obstacles or weather conditions. These protocols may fail because either some connections that are used by routing protocols do not exist, which effectively results in disconnecting the network, or the use of some connections causes livelocks. In this paper, we describe a robust routing protocol that tolerates up to roughly 40% of variation in the transmission ranges of the mobile hosts. More precisely, our protocol guarantees message delivery in a connected ad hoc network whenever the ratio of the maximum transmission range to the minimum transmission range is at most 2.