Experimental validation of resilient tree-based greedy geometric routing

Abstract

Geometric routing is an alternative for IP routing based on longest prefix matching. Using this routing paradigm, every node in the network is assigned a coordinate and packets are forwarded towards their intended destination following a distance-decreasing policy (greedy forwarding). This approach makes the routers significantly more memory-efficient compared to the current IP routers. In this routing, greedy embeddings are used to guarantee a 100% successful delivery to every destination in the network. Most of the existing proposals lack resiliency mechanisms to react efficiently to network changes. We propose a distributed algorithm to calculate a greedy embedding based on a spanning tree of the network. In this algorithm, nodes are triggered to re-calculate their coordinates upon a change in the topology such as link or node failures. The advantage of this approach is that it recovers from topology failures within a very short period of time. We further extend the algorithm to generate backups to apply protection in distributed setups. Different trade-offs and trends of re-convergence for geometric routing have been evaluated in an emulation environment. Realistic results are achieved through emulation as no model or abstraction is involved. The proposed routing scheme is implemented in Quagga routing software and new elements are developed in Click modular router to enable greedy forwarding. For the first time, the performance of this scheme is evaluated through emulation on a large topology of 1000 nodes and the results are compared with BGP. The experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme has interesting characteristics in terms of convergence time upon a change in the network topology.