VRAC: Virtual raw anchor coordinate routing in sensor networks

Geographic routing has been widely recognized as one of the most efficient approach to generally scalable wireless routing. However, in order to use geographic routing algorithms, nodes must be localized with Euclidean coordinates. Current localization techniques are dependent either on expensive hardware (e.g. GPS) or on costly virtual localization and this is a problem in sensor networks where resources are scarce. In this paper we directly use the raw distance to a set of anchors to route messages in a multi-dimensional space. This original approach enables us to completely bypass the localization phase while retaining useful geographic properties of the network. To prove this concept, we implemented two typical geographic routing algorithms using both traditional coordinates and multidimensional raw anchor coordinates. Simulation results show that using only the raw coordinates does not decrease routing efficiency.