Locating and bypassing routing holes in sensor networks

Many algorithms for routing in sensor networks exploit greedy forwarding strategies to get packets to their destinations. We study a fundamental difficulty such strategies face: the "local minimum phenomena" that can cause packets to get stuck. We give a definition of stuck nodes where packets may get stuck in greedy multi-hop forwarding, and develop a local rule, the TENT rule, for each node in the network to test whether a packet can get stuck at that node. To help the packets get out of stuck nodes, we describe a distributed algorithm, BOUNDHOLE, to build routes around holes, which are connected regions of the network with boundaries consisting of all the stuck nodes. We show that these hole-surrounding routes can be used in many applications such as geographic routing, path migration, information storage mechanisms and identification of regions of interest.