On-demand updates after a node failure in a wireless network

Abstract

Wireless networks are ubiquitous in our modern world, and we rely more and more on their continuous and reliable operation for battery-powered devices. Networks that self-maintain and self-heal are inherently more reliable. We study efficient and effective network self-healing and update methods for routing recovery following routing failures in a wireless multi-hop network. Network update processes are important since they enable local nodes to maintain the latest and updated neighbor information for routing given the network changes caused by failures. Network update also introduces control signals overhead. In this paper, we investigate the trade-off between routing performance and overhead cost with different network update algorithms and we characterize the performance of the proposed algorithms using network simulations. We show that network updates have positive impacts on routing. In particular, the on-demand route update method provides better results among compared techniques. The improvement is varying depending on the network topology and failure condition scenario.