Service availability enhancement of field-based routing in wireless mesh network

Abstract

Various routing protocols have been introduced so far, for example, shortest-path based unicast routing, geographic routing, and back-pressure routing. However, these routing protocols cannot simultaneously achieve short delay and high flexibility for dynamic traffic scenarios, which are essentially required to support recent applications. In this stage, field-based routing was introduced as a novel and powerful solution for wireless mesh networks (WMNs) because it can mitigate the limitations of the previous routing by considering distance and traffic dynamics at the same time. In other words, it means that the protocol simultaneously pursues short delays and high adaptability for dynamic traffic situations. It is possible to simultaneously satisfy the two requirements at once from the inspiration by other fields such as physics. In general, physics deals with natural phenomena and analyze it by utilizing mathematics. Most phenomena in nature commonly follow the most reasonable and acceptable rules. In this context, we attempt to adopt the inspiration method by physics because it can give us the important messages proven for a few centuries. In the concrete, we actually adopt a differential equation or electrical circuit equation which implies the principles of a phenomenon in physics through the inspiration. In order to obtain a solution of the equation, some boundary conditions are necessary. Importance of the boundary conditions is already known in mathematics and physics because the solution can change by the conditions. Further, there already exist a few prototypes such as Dirichlet, Neumann, Cauchy, and Robin boundary conditions in those fields. So far, most previous papers related to field-based routing have only focused on how to apply the equation to a network domain. However, we need to ponder on the boundary conditions with the relevant knowledge from mathematics and physics since performance can be directly affected by them. In brief, the above imp...