Title: Aligned virtual coordinates for greedy geometric routing in WSNs

Authors: Ke Liu, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, State University of New York, Binghamton, NY, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, State University of New York, Binghamton, NY, USA

Abstract: The performance of geographic routing protocols is impacted by physical voids and localisation errors. Traversing voids is carried out by a complimentary algorithm, which requires high overhead and results in lower quality paths. Furthermore, localisation errors lead to inefficient routes or even misrouting of packets. Accordingly, Virtual Coordinate Systems (VCS) were proposed to be an alternative solution that is resilient to localisation errors and naturally traverses physical voids. However, we show that VCS is vulnerable to different forms of anomalies and actually perform worse than physical coordinates. The goal of this paper is to increase the success or Greedy Forwarding (GF) in VCS, to avoid using the expensive complementary algorithm. We identify some of the reasons that cause anomalies in VCS and propose an Aligned Virtual Coordinate System (AVCS) to address them. AVCS aligns the coordinates of nodes by taking into account the coordinates of their neighbours. With AVCS, greedy routing success is significantly improved, approaching perfect delivery for many scenarios. With our approach, and for the first time, we show that greedy routing on VCS out performs that on geographic coordinate systems even in the absence of localisation errors. We compare AVCS against some of the most popular geometric routing protocols both on geographic and VCS and show that AVCS significantly improves performance over the best known solutions.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks; WSNs; geographic routing; virtual coordinates; wireless networks; localisation errors; physical voids; greedy forwarding; geometric routing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2008.019008

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2008 Vol.3 No.4, pp.252 - 265

Published online: 27 Jun 2008 *

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