Compact Conformal Map for Greedy Routing in Wireless Mobile Sensor Networks

Motivated by mobile sensor networks as in participatory sensing applications, we are interested in developing a practical, lightweight solution for routing in a mobile network. While greedy routing is robust to mobility, it may get stuck in a local minimum, which then requires non-trivial recovery methods. We find an embedding of the network such that greedy routing using the virtual coordinates guarantees delivery, thus eliminating the necessity of any recovery methods. Our contribution is to replace the in-network computation of the embedding by a preprocessing of the domain before network deployment and encode the map of network domain to virtual coordinate space by using a small number of parameters which can be preloaded to all sensor nodes. As a result, the map is only dependent on the network domain and is independent of the network connectivity. Each node can directly compute or update its virtual coordinates by applying the locally stored map on its geographical coordinates. This represents the first practical solution for using virtual coordinates for greedy routing in a sensor network and could be easily extended to the case of a mobile network. The paper describes algorithmic innovations as well as implementations on a real testbed.