A survey of void handling techniques for geographic routing in wireless networks

Communications voids, where geographic greedy forwarding fails to move a packet further towards its destination, are an important issue for geographic routing in wireless networks. This article presents an overview of the void problem and surveys the currently available void-handling techniques (as of July 2006) for geographic routing. In the survey, we classify these void-handling techniques into six categories, each designed with a different approach, that is, planar-graph-based, geometric, flooding-based, costbased, heuristic, and hybrid. For each category, we present its basic principle and illustrate some classic techniques as well as the latest advances. We also provide a qualitative comparison of these techniques and discuss some possible directions of future research.