Efficient paging in large-scale urban mesh networks

The task of forming a route can be broken into two parts, finding any route to the desired host and refining that route so it is suitable for the conenction. We refer to this first task as paging and it consists of simply delivering a single packet to the destination. Traditional MANET routing protocols perform this task via flooding. However, when the number of nodes ranges into the thousands, flooding becomes highly inefficient. In the case of cellular networks, paging is performed with one or more base stations broadcasting a page message. However, in large-scale urban networks, nodes are not necessarily in direct contact with the infrastructure, hence such techniques are not applicable. In this paper, the topology and architecture of a large-scale urban mesh network is examined and a scheme is developed for paging. This scheme is designed for and takes advantage of the topology, mobility, and architecture found in urban mesh networks. The resulting scheme is highly efficient in that it generates little overhead and is scalable.