Medial Axis Based Routing Has Constant Load Balancing Factor

Load balanced routing is a long standing yet challenging problem. Despite many years’ of work there is still a gap between theoretical research and practical algorithms. The main contribution in this paper is to bridge the gap and provide rigorous analysis of a practically interesting algorithm for routing in a large scale sensor network of complex shape – routing by using the medial axis of the network. In this algorithm, a skeleton of the network is extracted such that a virtual coordinate system can be developed for greedy routing achieving good load balance in simulations. We show for the first time a constant approximation factor for this algorithm by a highly technical analysis. The analysis explains the performance observed in previous simulations and is also the first known constant approximation algorithm for load balanced routing in a sensor network with nontrivial geometry.