Beacon-less geographic routing made practical: challenges, design guidelines, and protocols

Geographic routing has emerged as one of the most efficient and scalable routing solutions for wireless sensor networks. In traditional geographic routing protocols, each node exchanges periodic one-hop beacons to determine the position of its neighbors. Recent studies proved that these beacons can create severe problems in real deployments due to the highly dynamic and error-prone nature of wireless links. To avoid these problems, new variants of geographic routing protocols that do not require beacons are being proposed. In this article we review some of the latest proposals in the field of beacon-less geographic routing and introduce the main design challenges and alternatives. In addition, we perform an empirical study to assess the performance of beacon-based and beacon-less routing protocols using a real WSN deployment.