The Impact of Location Errors on Geographic Routing in Sensor Networks

Geographic routing in wireless sensor networks is based on the prerequisite that every node has information about its current position, for instance via GPS or some localization algorithm. This location information has a certain degree of inaccuracy in real deployments. The majority of geographic routing algorithms, however, has been designed for nodes with exact position information. We show that location errors yield bad performance or even complete failures. Two elaborated geographic routing algorithms for sensor networks, GPSR and BGR, are evaluated with the nodes having inaccurate location information, varying the standard deviation of the position error between zero and the transmission range. Simulation studies show a vast decrease of the packet delivery ratio. To enhance both algorithms, fixes for them are presented to improve the delivery ratio and to save energy in case of location errors.