text: We introduce and evaluate a very simple landmark-based network partition technique called Hierarchical Bipartition Routing (HBR) to support routing with delivery guarantee in wireless ad hoc sensor networks. It is a simple routing protocol that can easily be combined with any other greedy routing algorithm to obtain delivery guarantee. The efficiency of HBR increases if the network is sparse and contains obstacles. The space necessary to store the additional routing information at a node u is on average not larger than the size necessary to store the IDs of the neighbors of u. The amount of work to setup the complete data structure is on average proportional to flooding the entire network log(n) times, where n is the total number of sensor nodes. We evaluate the performance of HBR in combination with two simple energy-aware geographic greedy routing algorithms based on physical coordinates and virtual coordinates, respectively. Our simulations show that the difference between using HBR and a weighted shortest path to escape a dead-end is only a few percent in typical cases.
  @cite_26: Positioning systems in self-organizing networks generally rely on measurements such as delay and received signal strength, which may be difficult to obtain and often require dedicated equipment. An alternative to such approaches is to use simple connectivity information, that is, the presence or absence of a link between any pair of nodes, and to extend it to hop-counts, in order to obtain an approximate coordinate system. Such an approximation is sufficient for a l arge number of applications, such as routing. In this paper, we propose Jumps, a positioning system for those self-organizing networks in which other types of (exact) positioning systems cannot be used or are deemed to be too costly. Jumps builds a multiple coordinate system based solely on nodes’ neighborhood knowledge. Jumps is interesting in the context of wireless sensor networks, as it neither requires additional embedded equipment nor relies on any node’s capabilities. While other approaches use only three hop-count measurements to infer the position of a node, Jumps uses an arbitrary number. We observe that an increase in the number of measurements leads to an improvement in the localization process, without requiring a high dense environment. We show through simulations that Jumps, when compared with existing approaches, reduces the number of nodes sharing the same coordinates, which paves the way for functions such as position-based routing.
  @cite_9: In this paper we consider the problem of constructing a coordinate system in a sensor network where location information is not available. To this purpose we introduce the virtual coordinate assignment protocol (VCap) which defines a virtual coordinate system based on hop distances. As compared to other approaches, VCap is simple and have very little requirements in terms of communication and memory overheads. We compare by simulations the performances of greedy routing using our virtual coordinate system with the one using the physical coordinates. Results show that the virtual coordinate system can be used to efficiently support geographic routing.
  @cite_24: We present gradient landmark-based distributed routing (GLIDER), a novel naming addressing scheme and associated routing algorithm, for a network of wireless communicating nodes. We assume that the nodes are fixed (though their geographic locations are not necessarily known), and that each node can communicate wirelessly with some of its geographic neighbors - a common scenario in sensor networks. We develop a protocol which in a preprocessing phase discovers the global topology of the sensor field and, as a byproduct, partitions the nodes into routable tiles - regions where the node placement is sufficiently dense and regular that local greedy methods can work well. Such global topology includes not just connectivity but also higher order topological features, such as the presence of holes. We address each node by the name of the tile containing it and a set of local coordinates derived from connectivity graph distances between the node and certain landmark nodes associated with its own and neighboring tiles. We use the tile adjacency graph for global route planning and the local coordinates for realizing actual inter- and intra-tile routes. We show that efficient load-balanced global routing can be implemented quite simply using such a scheme.
  @cite_27: We propose a practical and scalable technique for point-to-point routing in wireless sensornets. This method, called Beacon Vector Routing (BVR), assigns coordinates to nodes based on the vector of hop count distances to a small set of beacons, and then defines a distance metric on these coordinates. BVR routes packets greedily, forwarding to the next hop that is the closest (according to this beacon vector distance metric) to the destination. We evaluate this approach through a combination of high-level simulation to investigate scaling and design tradeoffs, and a prototype implementation over real testbeds as a necessary reality check.
  @cite_31: We propose an energy efficient routing protocol, VCost, for sensor networks. We assume that nodes are unaware of their geographic location thus, VCost assigns virtual coordinates to nodes as follows. Based on the node hop count distances from a set of landmarks, our method computes a distance metric to obtain the node's virtual coordinates. VCost, then uses these coordinates to route packets from node u to node v, in its neighborhood, such that the ratio of the cost to send a message to v to the progress in the routing task towards the destination is minimized. Compared to existing algorithms that use virtual locations, our simulation shows that VCost improves significantly energy consumption and preserves the small percentage of successful routings.
summary: Landmark-based routing algorithms like VCap @cite_9 , JUMPS @cite_26 , GLIDER @cite_24 , VCost @cite_31 , and BVR @cite_27 use virtual coordinates computed from the distances to specific nodes called landmarks , anchors , or beacons . In the first phase, a global and distributed election mechanism elects a set of nodes acting as landmarks. Then the landmarks flood the entire network or only parts of the network such that every node can compute its virtual coordinate depending on the distances to the landmarks. The virtual coordinates can then be used to route a message greedily through the network. Packet delivery is also not guaranteed if different nodes have the same virtual coordinates.