Geo-logical routing in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Geo-Logical Routing (GLR) is a novel technique that brings the advantages of geographic routing to logical domain, without inheriting the disadvantages of physical domain, to achieve higher routability at a lower cost. It uses topology domain coordinates, derived solely from virtual coordinates (VCs), a better alternative for location information. In logical domain, a node is characterized by a VC vector, consisting of minimum number of hops to a set of anchor nodes. VCs contain information derived from connectivity of the network, but lack physical layout information such as directionality and geographic voids. Disadvantages of geographic routing, which relies on physical location information, include cost of node localization or/and use of GPS, as well as misrouting due to physical voids. With the ability to generate topological maps from virtual coordinates via a Singular Value Decomposition based technique, it is now possible to characterize a network with topological coordinates, which are shown to be more effective than physical coordinates for making routing decisions. By switching between a geographic routing scheme operating on topological coordinates and a logical routing scheme, GLR overcomes local minima in the respective domains. Performance results presented indicate that GLR significantly outperforms existing logical routing schemes - Convex Subspace Routing (CSR) and Logical Coordinate Routing (LCR) - as well as geographic scheme, Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR).