A Distributed Routing Algorithm for Internet-wide Geocast

Abstract

Geocast is the concept of sending data packets to nodes in a specified geographical area instead of nodes with a specific address. To route geocast messages to their destination we need a geographic routing algorithm that can route packets efficiently to the devices inside the destination area. Our goal is to design an algorithm that can deliver shortest path tree like forwarding while relying purely on distributed data without central knowledge. In this paper, we present two algorithms for geographic routing. One based purely on distance vector data, and one more complicated algorithm based on path data. In our evaluation, we show that our purely distance vector based algorithm can come close to shortest path tree performance when a small number of routers are present in the destination area. We also show that our path based algorithm can come close to the performance of a shortest path tree in almost all geocast situations