Simple and Efficient Geographic Routing Around Obstacles for Wireless Sensor Networks

Geographic routing is becoming the protocol of choice for many sensor network applications. The current state of the art is unsatisfactory: some algorithms are very efficient, however they require a preliminary planarization of the communication graph. Planarization induces overhead and is thus not realistic for some scenarios such as the case of highly dynamic network topologies. On the other hand, georouting algorithms which do not rely on planarization have fairly low success rates and fail to route messages around all but the simplest obstacles. To overcome these limitations, we propose the GRIC geographic routing algorithm. It has absolutely no topology maintenance overhead, almost 100% delivery rates (when no obstacles are added), bypasses large convex obstacles, finds short paths to the destination, resists link failure and is fairly simple to implement. The case of hard concave obstacles is also studied; such obstacles are hard instances for which performance diminishes.