Wireless networking: graph theory unplugged

  • Authors:
  • Roger Wattenhofer

  • Affiliations:
  • ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • WG'04 Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Wireless and mobile networks are an excellent playground for graph theoreticians. Many research challenges turn out to be variants of classic graph theory problems. In particular the rapidly growing areas of ad-hoc and sensor networks demand new solutions for timeless graph theory problems, because i) wireless devices have lower bandwidth and ii) wireless devices are mobile and therefore the topology of the network changes rather frequently. As a consequence, algorithms for wireless and mobile networks should have i) as little communication as possible and should ii) run as fast as possible. Both goals can only be achieved by developing algorithms requiring a small number of communication rounds only (so-called local algorithms). In this work we present a few connections between graph theory and wireless networking, such as topology control, clustering, and geo-routing. Each section is supplemented with an open problem.