Stateless and guaranteed geometric routing on virtual coordinate systems

Abstract

Geographic routing can provide efficient routing at a fixed overhead. However, the performance of geographic routing is impacted by physical voids, and localization errors. Accordingly, virtual coordinate systems (VCS) were proposed as an alternative approach that is resilient to localization errors and that naturally routes around physical voids. However, VCS also faces virtual anomalies. Moreover, there are no effective complementary routing algorithm that can be used to traverse voids. Most existing solutions use variants of flooding or blind searching when a void is encountered. In this paper, we make the observation that increasing the number of dimensions in virtual coordinate systems cannot eliminate all virtual anomalies since some portions of the network may be 1-connected to the rest of the network. As a result, we conjecture that a delivery guaranteed protocol must be one-dimensional and propose a spanning-path virtual coordinate system that has this property. We develop a delivery guaranteed routing algorithm on top of this system that can be used on its own, or as a complementary algorithm to traverse voids. With this approach, and for the first time, we demonstrate a stateless and delivery guaranteed geometric routing algorithm on VCS. When used in conjunction with our previously proposed aligned virtual coordinate system (AVCS), it out-performs not only all geometric routing protocols on VCS, but also geographic routing with accurate location information.