The Four Principles of Geographic Routing

Geographic routing consists in using the position information of nodes to assist in the routing process, and has been a widely studied subject in sensor networks. One of the outstanding challenges facing geographic routing has been its applicability. Authors either make some broad assumptions on an idealized version of wireless networks which are often unverifiable, or they use costly methods to planarize the communication graph. The overarching questions that drive us are the following. When, and how should we use geographic routing? Is there a criterion to tell whether a communication network is fit for geographic routing? When exactly does geographic routing make sense? In this paper we formulate the four principles that define geographic routing and explore their topological consequences. Given a localized communication network, we then define and compute its geographic eccentricity, which measures its fitness for geographic routing. Finally we propose a distributed algorithm that either enables geographic routing on the network or proves that its geographic eccentricity is too high.