Greedy Hop Distance Routing Using Tree Recovery on Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

Connectivity-based routing protocols use the hop count vector to a group of anchors for packet forwarding. Due to the discrete nature of hop count based coordinates, without an effective recovery mechanism, these protocols will frequently encounter failures at network local minimum sites. In this paper, we propose a new connectivity-based routing protocol named Hop Distance Routing(HDR) with an efficient distance metric called hop distance. To ensure packet delivery, HDR complements greedy forwarding with a tree based recovery method, which allows the packet to traverse the branches and escape from local minimum locations. By labeling each tree node with an angle range, HDR can identify the subtree where the destination resides and forward the packet towards it until greedy forwarding can be resumed. Compared to other connectivity-based routing protocols such as NoGeo, BVR, LCR and VPCR, performance results show that the HDR protocol provides the highest packet delivery ratio and the lowest path stretch with the minimal communication overhead for each packet delivery on the node density range from 1.76 to 17.67.