2002/07/17 by Ahmed Helmy, Helmy, Ahmed
Computer Science · #C.2.1 #C.2.2 #Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Mobile Ad Hoc Networks #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cs/0207069
openalex publication_date 2002/07/17 · openalex created_date 2022/09/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this study, the concept of small worlds is investigated in the context of\nlarge-scale wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. Wireless networks are spatial\ngraphs that are usually much more clustered than random networks and have much\nhigher path length characteristics. We observe that by adding only few random\nlinks, path length of wireless networks can be reduced drastically without\naffecting clustering. What is even more interesting is that such links need not\nbe formed randomly but may be confined to a limited number of hops between the\nconnected nodes. This has an important practical implication, as now we can\nintroduce a distributed algorithm in large-scale wireless networks, based on\nwhat we call contacts, to improve the performance of resource discovery in such\nnetworks, without resorting to global flooding. We propose new contact-based\nprotocols for adding logical short cuts in wireless networks efficiently. The\nnew protocols take advantage of mobility in order to increase reachability of\nthe search. We study the performance of our proposed contact-based\narchitecture, and clarify the context in which large-scale wireless networks\ncan be turned into small world networks.\n