Geographic Routing with Partial Position Information

Geographic routing protocols show good properties for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). They are stateless, local and scalable. However they require that each node of the network is aware of its own position. While it may be possible to equip each node with GPS receiver, even if it is costly, there are some issues and receiving a usable GPS signal may be difficult in some situations. For these reasons, we propose a geographic routing algorithm, called HGA, able to take advantages of position informations of nodes when available but also able to continue the routing in a more traditional way if position information is not available. We show with simulations that our algorithm offers an alternative solution to classical routing algorithm (non-geographic) and offers better performances for network with a density above 25 and more than 5% of nodes are aware of their position.