Greedy Routing with Bounded Stretch

Greedy routing is a novel routing paradigm where messages are always forwarded to the neighbor that is closest to the destination. Our main result is a polynomial-time algorithm that embeds combinatorial unit disk graphs (CUDGs - a CUDG is a UDG without any geometric information) into O(log(2)n)-dimensional space, permitting greedy routing with constant stretch. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first greedy embedding with stretch guarantees for this class of networks. Our main technical contribution involves extracting, in polynomial time, a constant number of isometric and balanced tree separators from a given CUDG. We do this by extending the celebrated Lipton-Tarjan separator theorem for planar graphs to CUDGs. Our techniques extend to other classes of graphs; for example, for general graphs, we obtain an O(log n)-stretch greedy embedding into O(log(2)n)-dimensional space. The greedy embeddings constructed by our algorithm can also be viewed as a constant-stretch compact routing scheme in which each node is assigned an O(log(3)n)-bit label. To the best of our knowledge, this result yields the best known stretch-space trade-off for compact routing on CUDGs. Extensive simulations on random wireless networks indicate that the average routing overhead is about 10%; only few routes have a stretch above 1.5.