Position-based routing for heterogeneous wireless ad hoc networks

Position based routing methods have been used successfully recently for homogeneous wireless networks when all nodes have the same transmission range, and the signal will be received by all nodes with the transmission range. All these protocols are likely to fail for heterogeneous wireless ad hoc networks, or the signal could be blocked by obstacles. We assume that two nodes can always communicate directly if their distance is no more than (√2/2)R, where R is the maximum transmission range. A method has been proposed in [L. Barriere, et al., (2001)] to construct a planar topology using some virtual links for some routing protocols, such as [P. Bose, et al., (1999)], [F. Kuhn, et al., (2003)]. We present an improved method to construct another planar topology and our simulations show that our protocol out-performs the previous method for dense networks significantly: it uses much less messages and creates much less virtual links, while the routing performances of our method is almost the same as the previous method.