Beacon vector routing: scalable point-to-point routing in wireless sensornets

Abstract

We propose a practical and scalable technique for point-to-point routing in wireless sensornets. This method, called Beacon Vector Routing (BVR), assigns coordinates to nodes based on the vector of hop count distances to a small set of beacons, and then defines a distance metric on these coordinates. BVR routes packets greedily, forwarding to the next hop that is the closest (according to this beacon vector distance metric) to the destination. We evaluate this approach through a combination of high-level simulation to investigate scaling and design tradeoffs, and a prototype implementation over real testbeds as a necessary reality check.