Geometric Structures for Routing Decision in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

This chapter surveys routing algorithms in Euclidean, virtual, and hyperbolic space for wireless sensor networks that use geometric structures for route decisions. Wireless sensor networks have a unique geographic nature as the sensor nodes are embedded and designed for employing in the geographic space. Thus, the various geometric abstractions of the network can be used for routing algorithm design, which can provide scalability and efficiency. This chapter starts with the importance and impulse of the geographical routing in wireless sensor networks that exploits location information of the nodes to determine the alternatives of the next hop node on the desired routing path. The scalability of geographical routing encourages more effort on the design of virtual coordinates system, with which geographical routing algorithms are built up and applied to route data packets in the network. The geometry of large sensor network motivates to calculate geometric abstractions in hyperbolic space. Thus the challenge is to embed the network virtually or hyperbolically, which affects the performance and efficiency in the geographical message delivery.