Resilient Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks on High Genus Surfaces

Abstract

This paper considers a fundamental problem of designing routing scheme resilient to node or link failures for wireless sensor networks deployed on a surface of a complex-connected three-dimensional (3D) setting. Instead of heuristically detouring around the failed path, we borrow homotopy, an important topological concept, to effectively create and evaluate the diversity of alternative paths. We propose a tessellation-free and GPS-free method to compute paths with different homotopy types on surface networks. A source node greedily forwards a packet to its destination based on the computed nodes’ virtual planar coordinates. When the current path fails, the source node can flexibly choose another greedy path from a different homotopy type to deliver the packet. The proposed algorithms are distributed and scalable to both the size and genus number of a surface network. We evaluate the performance of the proposed routing scheme under three different failure models. Simulation results show that our method achieves the best performance under geographically correlated failure models compared with other resilient routing schemes. We also compare our routing scheme with existing state-of-the-art ones specifically designed for surface networks when a network is failure free. Our method achieves the lowest stretch factor.