Hierarchical Bipartition Routing for delivery guarantee in sparse wireless ad hoc sensor networks with obstacles

TL;DR

This paper presents Hierarchical Bipartition Routing (HBR), a simple landmark-based technique that guarantees delivery in sparse, obstacle-rich wireless sensor networks, enhancing existing greedy routing algorithms with minimal additional overhead.

Contribution

The paper introduces HBR, a novel landmark-based routing method that guarantees delivery in challenging network conditions and can be integrated with existing greedy algorithms.

Findings

HBR improves delivery guarantees in sparse networks with obstacles.

HBR's storage overhead is comparable to neighbor ID storage.

Simulation results show minimal performance difference when combined with greedy routing.

Abstract

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.