ARROW: Azimuth-Range ROuting for large-scale Wireless sensor networks

During the past few years, the development of wireless sensor network technologies has spurred the design of novel protocol paradigms capable of meeting the needs of a wide broad of applications while taking into account the inherent constraints of the underlying network technologies, e.g. limited energy and computational capacities. Geographic routing is one of such paradigms whose principles of operation are based on the geographic location of the network nodes. Even though the large number of works already reported in the literature, there are still many open issues towards the design of robust and scalable geographic routing algorithms. In this study, after an analysis of the most relevant solutions reported in the literature, we introduce Azimuth-Range ROuting for large-scale Wireless (ARROW) sensor networks. ARROW goes a step further on the design of geographic routing protocols by defining a simple and robust routing protocol whose operation principles completely free the network nodes of the burden of keeping routing records. Under ARROW, nodes carry out all routing decisions exclusively using the information imbedded in the data packets while avoiding the risk of routing loops, a major challenge when designing routing protocols for large-scale networks. Moreover, ARROW is supplemented with a simple yet effective forwarder resolution protocol, also introduced in this study, allowing the fast and loop-free selection of the forwarding node in a hop-to-hop basis. Both protocols, ARROW and the proposed forwarder resolution protocol, are validated by extensive computer simulations. Our results show that both protocols exhibit excellent scalability properties by limiting the overhead.