Smallworld routing for tactical networks

In mission critical networks, nodes need to communicate with minimum delay and loss. This calls for routing protocols that can quickly and efficiently route the application traffic to their destinations. This paper proposes a distance-based routing protocol, named as Smallworld, which finds efficient routes to target nodes often through a very short chain of intermediate nodes, without using any routing table like other standard routing protocols. This protocol exploits the “small-world” phenomenon of social networks where source-destination pairs typically get connected through few intermediate friends and the individuals can collectively discover such short paths. The key idea behind this routing protocol is that for forwarding an incoming packet to the destination, a node picks the next hop from between a one-hop neighbor, from its one-hop neighborhood that is closest to the destination, and a randomly selected long-distance neighbor, i.e., from outside of its one-hop neighborhood, based on which of these two neighbors is closer to the destination. This simple but effective algorithm can meet mission performance objectives by reducing packet losses, end-to-end delays, hop-counts, connectivity drops and control overheads in many tactical scenarios of interest.