Method
Each node implementing WRP keeps a table of routes and distances and link costs. It also maintains a 'message retransmission list' (MRL).
Routing table entries contain distance to a destination node, the previous and next nodes along the route, and is tagged to identify the route's state: whether it is a simple path, loop or invalid route. (Storing the previous and successive nodes assists in detecting loops and avoiding the counting-to-infinity problem - a shortcoming of Distance Vector Routing.)
The link cost table maintains the cost of the link to its nearest neighbors (nodes within direct transmission range), and the number of timeouts since successfully receiving a message from the neighbor.
Nodes periodically exchange routing tables with their neighbors via update messages, or whenever the link state table changes. The MRL maintains a list of which neighbors are yet to acknowledged an update message, so they can be retransmitted if necessary. Where no change in the routing table, a node is required to transmit a 'hello' message to affirm its connectivity.
When an update message is received, a node updates its distance table and reassesses the best route paths. It also carries out a consistency check with its neighbors, to help eliminate loops and speed up convergence.
Read more about this topic: Wireless Routing Protocol
Famous quotes containing the word method:
“As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet’s utopia.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“... [a] girl one day flared out and told the principal “the only mission opening before a girl in his school was to marry one of those candidates [for the ministry].” He said he didn’t know but it was. And when at last that same girl announced her desire and intention to go to college it was received with about the same incredulity and dismay as if a brass button on one of those candidate’s coats had propounded a new method for squaring the circle or trisecting the arc.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“... the one lesson in the ultimate triumph of any great actress has been to enforce the fact that a method all technique or a method all throes, is either one or the other inadequate, and often likely to work out in close proximity to the ludicrous.”
—Mrs. Leslie Carter (1862–1937)