Practical Virtual Coordinates for large wireless sensor networks

Geographic routing is a promising approach for point-to-point routing in wireless sensor networks, but it requires the availability of geographic coordinates. Location devices like GPS do not work indoors and they are often not cost-effective for ubiquitous deployment on a large scale. While it is possible to manually configure coordinates for small sensor networks, it is infeasible to do the same for large-scale networks with thousands of nodes. We present Particle Swarm Virtual Coordinates (PSVC), a distributed virtual coordinate assignment algorithm that employs Particle Swarm Optimization to compute virtual coordinates for geographic routing. PSVC converges faster, achieves a lower hop stretch, and scales well up to large networks of 3,200 nodes compared to NoGeo. Also, PSVC makes no assumptions on the network topology and can naturally be extended to three-dimensional (3D) wireless sensor networks.