BOSS: Beacon-less On Demand Strategy for Geographic Routing inWireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Geographic routing (GR) algorithms, require nodes to periodically transmit HELLO messages to allow neighbors know their positions (beaconing mechanism). To reduce the control overhead due to theses messages, beacon-less routing algorithms have recently been proposed. However, existing beacon-less algorithms have not considered realistic physical layers. Therefore, those algorithms can not work properly in realistic scenarios. In this paper we present a new beacon-less routing protocol called BOSS. Its design is based on the conclusions of our open-field experiments using Tmote-sky sensors. BOSS is adapted to error-prone networks and uses a new delay function to reduce collisions and duplicate messages produced during the phase of selecting the next forwarder. Through extensive simulations we compare BOSS with BLR and CBF and show that our scheme is able to achieve almost perfect packet delivery ratio (like BLR) while having a low bandwidth consumption (even lower than CBF).