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A Robust Routing Protocol for 5G Mesh Networks

Niclas Führling, Ivan Alexander Morales Sandoval, Giuseppe Thadeu Freitas de Abreu

TL;DR

The paper addresses robust routing in ad-hoc 5G mesh networks with dynamic topology and missing links. It introduces a three-stage pipeline combining decentralized network discovery on incomplete graphs, discrete-aware matrix completion to recover hop distances, and privacy-preserving multihop localization to estimate positions without sharing exact coordinates. A local discovery phase finalizes the complete hop matrix and routes, enabling decentralized routing without network-wide flooding. Empirical results show lower average hop counts and stronger robustness to incompleteness compared with BFS-based state-of-the-art methods, highlighting practical gains for DECT 2020 NR mesh deployments.

Abstract

We consider a novel routing protocol suitable for ad-hoc networks with dynamically changing topologies, such as DECT 2020 NR (NR+) systems, which often lead to missing links between the nodes and thus, incomplete or inefficient routes. A key point of the proposed protocol is the combination of network discovery and matrix completion techniques, which allow the nodes to establish communication paths efficiently and reliably. Additionally, multihop localization is performed to estimate the location of the nodes without needing to broadcast each node's geographical position, thus preserving privacy during the routing process and enabling nodes in the network to independently find potentially missing paths in a decentralized manner instead of flooding the whole network. Simulation results illustrate the good performance of the proposed technique in terms of the average number of hops of the obtained routes in different scenarios, with different network densities and amounts of incompleteness.

A Robust Routing Protocol for 5G Mesh Networks

TL;DR

The paper addresses robust routing in ad-hoc 5G mesh networks with dynamic topology and missing links. It introduces a three-stage pipeline combining decentralized network discovery on incomplete graphs, discrete-aware matrix completion to recover hop distances, and privacy-preserving multihop localization to estimate positions without sharing exact coordinates. A local discovery phase finalizes the complete hop matrix and routes, enabling decentralized routing without network-wide flooding. Empirical results show lower average hop counts and stronger robustness to incompleteness compared with BFS-based state-of-the-art methods, highlighting practical gains for DECT 2020 NR mesh deployments.

Abstract

We consider a novel routing protocol suitable for ad-hoc networks with dynamically changing topologies, such as DECT 2020 NR (NR+) systems, which often lead to missing links between the nodes and thus, incomplete or inefficient routes. A key point of the proposed protocol is the combination of network discovery and matrix completion techniques, which allow the nodes to establish communication paths efficiently and reliably. Additionally, multihop localization is performed to estimate the location of the nodes without needing to broadcast each node's geographical position, thus preserving privacy during the routing process and enabling nodes in the network to independently find potentially missing paths in a decentralized manner instead of flooding the whole network. Simulation results illustrate the good performance of the proposed technique in terms of the average number of hops of the obtained routes in different scenarios, with different network densities and amounts of incompleteness.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 15 sections, 8 equations, 4 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Network Model
  3. System Model
  4. Proposed method
  5. Network Discovery
  6. Incomplete Network Discovery
  7. A Note on the State-of-the-Art
  8. Hop Recovery via Matrix Completion
  9. Privacy-preserving Multihop Localization
  10. Vicinity Discovery
  11. Gateway Discovery
  12. Multihop Localization
  13. Local Discovery
  14. Performance Evaluation
  15. Conclusion

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: Illustration of a conventional multihop DECT-2020 NR Network containing multiple relay nodes, many leaf nodes and one gateway node that has internet connectivity multiple clusters.
  • Figure 2: Illustration of the system scenario of a mesh network with multiple relay nodes and three gateways, where a link between nodes are displayed by solid lines and temporarily blocked links are illustrated by dashed lines, additionally displaying the radio range by the dashed circle.
  • Figure 3: Average number of hops over the network density for different levels of missing edges.
  • Figure 4: Average number of hops over the amount of incompleteness for $\tilde{\lambda}=6$.