On using Virtual Coordinates for Routing in the Context of Wireless Sensor Networks

For low-energy, low-throughput Wireless Sensor Networks, geographic forwarding avoids creating and maintaining a structure using clustering or gradient construction. Yet, geographic forwarding assumes position-awareness, which may be not realistic. In this paper, we propose to use virtual coordinates. Each node determines its [x,y] position in a virtual space based on a random or pseudo-random process. It uses these coordinates to route information with geographical-inspired routing protocols. Extensive simulation shows that this approach can be very efficient for low-throughput WSN.