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Beacon-Less Geographic Routing in Real Wireless Sensor Networks

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Abstract

Geographic Routing (GR) algorithms require nodes to periodically transmit HELLO messages to allow neighbors to know their positions (beaconing mechanism). Beacon-less routing algorithms have recently been proposed to reduce the control overheads due to these messages. However, existing beacon-less algorithms have not considered realistic physical layers. Therefore, those algorithms cannot work properly in realistic scenarios. In this paper we present a new beaconless routing protocol called BOSS. Its design is based on the conclusions of our open-field experiments using Tmote-sky sensors. BOSS is adapted to error-prone networks and incorporates a new mechanism to reduce collisions and duplicate messages produced during the selection of the next forwarder node. We compare BOSS with Beacon-Less Routing (BLR) and Contention-Based Forwarding (CBF) algorithms through extensive simulations. The results show that our scheme is able to achieve almost perfect packet delivery ratio (like BLR) while having a low bandwidth consumption (even lower than CBF). Additionally, we carried out an empirical evaluation in a real testbed that shows the correctness of our simulation results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Communications Engineering, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain

    Juan A. Sánchez, Rafael Marín-Pérez & Pedro M. Ruiz

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  1. Juan A. Sánchez
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  2. Rafael Marín-Pérez
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  3. Pedro M. Ruiz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Juan A. Sánchez.

Additional information

This work is supported by Spanish MEC under Grant No. TIN2005-07705-C02-02 and the “Ramony Cajal” work programme.

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Sánchez, J.A., Marín-Pérez, R. & Ruiz, P.M. Beacon-Less Geographic Routing in Real Wireless Sensor Networks. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 23, 438–450 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-008-9145-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-008-9145-8

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