High delivery rate position-based routing algorithms for 3D ad hoc networks

Position-based routing algorithms use the geographic position of the nodes in a network to make the forwarding decisions. Recent research in this field primarily addresses such routing algorithms in two dimensional (2D) space. However, in real applications, nodes may be distributed in three dimensional (3D) environments. In this paper, we propose several randomized position-based routing algorithms and their combination with restricted directional flooding-based algorithms for routing in 3D environments. The first group of algorithms AB3D are extensions of previous randomized routing algorithms from 2D space to 3D space. The second group ABLAR chooses m neighbors according to a space-partition heuristic and forwards the message to all these nodes. The third group T-ABLAR-T uses progress-based routing until a local minimum is reached. The algorithm then switches to ABLAR for one step after which the algorithm switches back to the progress-based algorithm again. The fourth group AB3D-ABLAR uses an algorithm from the AB3D group until a threshold is passed in terms of number of hops. The algorithm then switches to an ABLAR algorithm. The algorithms are evaluated and compared with current routing algorithms. The simulation results on unit disk graphs (UDG) show a significant improvement in delivery rate (up to 99%) and a large reduction of the traffic.