Virtual position based geographic routing for wireless sensor networks

As sensor networks are deployed over various terrains, the complexity of their topology continues to grow. Voids in networks often cause existing geographic routing algorithms to fail. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept: virtual position to address this issue. A virtual position is the middle position of all direct neighbors of a node. Such virtual position reflects the neighborhood of a sensor node, as well as the tendency of further forwarding. Instead of comparing nodes' real geographic positions, virtual positions are compared when selecting the next hop. For sparsely-deployed networks, this technique increases success rate of packet routing without introducing significant overhead. We here present an algorithm using this foundation concept and then design several enhanced versions to improve success rate of packet routing in sensor networks. We also conduct complexity analysis of the algorithms and support our claims of the algorithms' superiority with extensive simulation results. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.