Geographic Routing in Distributed Sensor Systems without Location Information

Geographic routing protocols have been widely used in microsensor networks, however, they cannot directly apply to distributed mobile sensor systems as mobile sensors often do not know their neighbors´ exact physical locations. In this paper we consider geographic routing in distributed sensor systems without location information. We address the problem by introducing a lightweight and distributed virtual coordinate assignment protocol. We focus on the effectiveness of routing algorithms for distributed data fusion in the system and provide a detailed analysis of several routing algorithms for a sensor system with group mobility. Our simulation results show that controlled data flows significantly increase the probability of relevant data being fused