Improved-Zigzag: An Improved Local-Information-Based Self-optimizing Routing Algorithm in Virtual Grid Networks

A wireless network consisting of many wireless devices becomes popular and essential in distributed systems. In the wireless networks, each wireless device, also called nodes, can directly communicate with other devices located within its communication range. However, to communicate with the nodes outside the communication range, the message should be relayed to the target node via some other nodes. A virtual grid network is an overlay network on a wireless network which can be constructed by virtually dividing the area covered by the wireless network into geographical square regions of the same size, selecting a representative node at each region, and connecting the nodes of neighboring regions. A virtual grid network is utilized for realizing an energy-efficient wireless network because not all of the nodes in the system need to join the routing, moreover, a routing algorithm can be easily designed thanks to regularity of the grid topology. A local-information-based self-optimizing routing algorithm, Zigzag, in virtual grid networks was proposed. In this paper, we propose the locality-based model, named \((\alpha , \beta )\)-range model, based on the snapshot range \(\alpha \) and communication range \(\beta \) to clearly specify the locality. Moreover, we propose a new self-optimizing routing algorithm Improved-Zigzag which improves Zigzag by reducing the snapshot range.