GRAPE - Gradient based Routing for All PurposE

Routing within wireless mobile multi-hop networks a challenging task. Therefore, in the past several routing protocols have been developed with various extensions and adoptions to certain specific scenarios. The consensus of the discussion about routing is that depending on all aspects of their application reaching from number of nodes, mobility, to the data traffic profile of the application developers can choose an optimal routing protocol. In the meantime some routing protocols have evolved as standard choice like AODV, DSR, OLSR, TBRPF. With the advent of sensor networks, requirements like scalability and resource consumption are added to the research domain. This resulted in additional extremely specialized routing algorithms or special extensions to existing protocols. So is there really a need and room for another routing protocol? We are convinced that a really simple, efficient, scalable protocol that allows for mobility and is suited for various performance classes of devices does not exist. We propose GRAPE as a completely new approach for routing in wireless multi-hop networks and present performance results based on simulations and measurements that demonstrate the potential of the routing approach.