Impact of location errors on geographic routing in realistic WSNs

Two assumptions used in the studies of geographic routing in WSNs are: 1) high link reliability; 2) accurate localization. A number of recent studies have pointed out that neither of these assumptions can be validated in reality. Firstly, in real WSN deployments, wireless links vary over space and time and can be highly unreliable. Therefore the commonly used UDG model is not realistic. Secondly, it has been proved that inevitably location errors also lead to a substantial degradation in the performance of geographic routing. In this paper, we study geographic routing under a more realistic WSN scenario, which considers both a realistic packet loss model and localization inaccuracy. Extensive analysis and simulation results provide an insight into the impact of the realistic environment on geographic routing and expose new findings and problems which have not been discovered or have been miss understood in WSNs.