On the efficiency of routing in sensor networks

In sensor networks, a key efficiency measure for routing protocols is the stretch of the computed paths, where the stretch is the ratio of the path length and the Euclidean distance covered. In the literature, many protocols have been evaluated via extensive simulations, and often come without any theoretical guarantees. For those whose performances are theoretically guaranteed there is an important gap between the theoretical predictions and the experimental results. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we give theoretical results that explain the observed efficiency of many of the algorithms proposed in the literature. Second, we propose ROAM2, a deterministic routing protocol, that requires a single bit of memory at each node and that ensures, with high probability (depending on the node distribution), that the paths have a constant stretch. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.