Look-ahead geographic routing for sensor networks

Abstract

As sensor networks are deployed over various terrains, the complexity of their topology continues to grow. Voids in networks often cause existing geographic routing algorithms to fail. In this paper, we propose a novel geographic routing algorithm called “Greedy Forwarding with VIrtual Position (ViP)”. We introduce virtual position as the middle position of all direct neighbors of a node. Instead of comparing nodes' real geographic positions, ViP employs virtual positions when selecting the next hop. Such virtual position reflects the neighborhood of a sensor node, as well as the tendency of further forwarding. For sparsely-deployed networks, ViP increases success rate of packet routing without introducing significant overhead. Furthermore, multiple levels of virtual position can be obtained with localized iteration. We propose the “Greedy Forwarding with Multi-level Virtual Position (MVP)” algorithm and the “Greedy Forwarding with Hierarchical Virtual Position (HVP)” algorithm. Different levels of virtual positions and their combinations are used alternatively to increase success rate of packet routing in sensor networks.