Comparison of the beacon-less geographic routing protocols in wireless sensor networks

Geographic routing deals with delivering a message to a specific position in a wireless network. Instead of using routing tables, the routing decisions are made on the current position of sender node and the position of the destination node. Geographic routing is one of the most efficient and scalable routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks. In traditional geographic routing protocols, nodes exchange periodic position information to make a table that holds the positions of single hop neighboring nodes. This leads to unnecessary use of energy and bandwidth. Recent research showed that these beacons can create severe problems due to the highly dynamic structure of the wireless system. In this article we review some of the latest beacon-less geographic routing protocols and compare them to show their advantages and deficiencies.