An Underlay Strategy for Indirect Routing

Abstract

The evolution of the Internet toward ubiquity, mobility, and independence of wired infrastructure requires revising routing in large dynamic clouds. The need for frequent address updates caused by node mobility suggests decoupling the permanent node identifier from its topological address. This paper proposes Tribe, an indirect and scalable routing protocol for self-organizing networks. Tribe provides an anchor-based abstraction, where the communication is split into two phases: location of the destination node and direct communication between source and destination, associated with appropriate addressing schemes. Tribe anchor nodes play the role of rendezvous points and are responsible for translating a node's identifier into a topology-dependent address. Tribe achieves high scalability by distributing location information among all nodes in the network using peer-to-peer concepts. By managing regions of a logical addressing space, Tribe nodes route in a hop-by-hop basis with small amount of information and communication cost. A qualitative analysis of the Tribe topology and a performance evaluation of the protocol behavior are provided. Tribe raises fundamental issues and triggers a high potential for future work.