Geographic Routing with Limited Information in Sensor Networks

Abstract: Geographic routing with greedy relaying strategies have been widely studied as a routing scheme in sensor networks. These schemes assume that the nodes have perfect information about the location of the destination. When the distance between the source and destination is normalized to unity, the asymptotic routing delays in these schemes are $\Theta(\frac{1}{M(n)}),$ where M(n) is the maximum distance traveled in a single hop (transmission range of a radio). In this paper, we consider routing scenarios where nodes have location errors (imprecise GPS), or where only coarse geographic information about the destination is available, and only a fraction of the nodes have routing information. We show that even with such imprecise or limited destination-location information, the routing delays are $\Theta(\frac{1}{M(n)})$. We also consider the throughput-capacity of networks with progressive routing strategies that take packets closer to the destination in every step, but not necessarily along a straight-line. We show that the throughput-capacity with progressive routing is order-wise the same as the maximum achievable throughput-capacity.