Geographic Routing Without Location Information

Abstract

For many years, scalable routing for wireless communication systems was a compelling but elusive goal. Recently, several routing algorithms that exploit geographic information (e.g. GPSR) have been proposed to achieve this goal. These algorithms refer to nodes by their location, not address, and use those coordinates to route greedily, when possible, towards the destination. However, there are many situations where location information is not available at the nodes, and so geographic methods cannot be used. In this paper we define a scalable coordinate-based routing algorithm that does not rely on location information, and thus can be used in a wide variety of ad hoc and sensornet environments.