Virtual Surrounding Face Geocasting in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

Geocasting in wireless sensor and ad hoc networks means delivering a message from a source node to all the nodes in a given geographical region. The objectives of a geocasting protocol are two-fold: guaranteed message delivery and low transmission cost. Most of the existing protocols do not guarantee message delivery, and those that do, incur high transmission costs. In this study, we propose the concept of Virtual Surrounding Face (VSF), and design a VSF-based geocasting protocol (VSFG). We also design a SKIP method and a local dominating set (DS) based restricted flooding technique to further reduce the cost of VSFG. Through mathematical analysis and comprehensive simulations, we show that VSFG, together with SKIP and local DS based restricted flooding, guarantees message delivery and has a much lower transmission cost than the previous approaches. The reduction of cost can be up to 65 % compared with the most efficient existing approach.