Routing with Hexagonal Virtual Coordinates in Wireless Sensor Networks

Using geographic routing, like GPSR, is efficient for ad hoc and wireless sensor networks, but it requires that nodes be aware of their physical positions. However, if there are holes in the network, routing across holes in GPSR will lead to a lot of overloaded nodes in the boundaries of the holes. In this paper, we propose a distributed protocol, named the hexagonal virtual coordinate (HVC), for constructing a virtual coordinate system. After the HVC is constructed, the nodes in the network will be aware of relative coordinates among the landmarks through the HVC chart. Based on the HVC chart, a source node can find an auxiliary routing path to indicate the direction of the journey from the source to the destination. Simulation results show that our protocol can support geographic routing efficiently.