Beacon Location Service: A Location Service for Point-to-Point Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we present Beacon Location Service (BLS): a location service for beacon-based routing algorithms like Beacon Vector Routing (BVR) [8] and S4 [19]. The role of a location service is to map node names to topologically meaningful addresses that can be used for routing. We evaluate an implementation of BLS that works on top of BVR. BLS resolves the destination node's name to BVR coordinates and then uses BVR to route the source message to the destination node. Together, BVR with BLS offer a complete solution for scalable point-to-point routing in sensornets. We describe our design and its implementation and evaluate BLS in simulation and on a sensornet testbed. Our results show it can sustain a high look-up and routing success rate (greater than 90% on most network sizes we tested) over various send rates and network sizes. We also compare our results to two existing point-to-point routing schemes for sensornets, and show that BLS+BVR performs comparably to state of the art point-to-point routing protocols. Finally, we demonstrate a simplified distributed hash table application implemented over BLS.