Novel Navigation Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks without Information of Locations

In this paper, we propose a novel distributed navigation algorithm for people to escape from critical event region in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Unlike existing works, the scenario discussed in the paper has no goal or exit as guidance, leading to a big challenge for the navigation problem. To solve it, our proposed navigation algorithm computes the convex hull of the event region just by some topological methods. With the reference of the convex hull, people can be easily navigated out of the event region. Both the computation complexity and communication overhead of the proposed algorithm are very low, as it only needs to flood two shortest path trees in a limited area around the event region with a distance [L/2π] + 1 to the event boundary, where L is the length of the boundary. Conducted simulations have verified the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed algorithm.