Efficient Delaunay‐based localized routing for wireless sensor networks

Consider a wireless sensor network consisting of n wireless sensors randomly distributed in a two-dimensional plane. In this paper, we show that with high probability we can locally find a path for any pair of sensors such that the length of the path is no more than a constant factor of the minimum. By assuming each sensor knows its position, our new routing method decides where to forward the message purely based on the position of current node, its neighbours, and the positions of the source and the target. Our method is based on a novel structure called localized Delaunay triangulation and a geometric routing method that guarantees that the distance travelled by the packets is no more than a small constant factor of the minimum when the Delaunay triangulation of sensor nodes are known. Our experiments show that the delivery rates of existing localized routing protocols are increased when localized Delaunay triangulation is used instead of several previously proposed topologies, and our localized routing protocol based on Delaunay triangulation works well in practice. We also conducted extensive simulations of another localized routing protocol, face routing. The path found by this protocol is also reasonably good compared with previous one although it cannot guarantee a constant approximation on the length of the path travelled theoretically. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.