A Location Service for Point-to-Point Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we present a location service for Beacon Vector Routing (BVR), a point-to-point routing scheme for wireless sensor networks. A location service is necessary for decoupling the static node identifiers and dynamic BVR coordinates. This allows a node to use unique identifiers when communicating with a destination node, instead of using coordinate information directly. Our scheme uses beacons in the network as distributed look-up servers; each containing mappings of identifiers to coordinates. When a node wants to route data to another node, the sending node passes the destination node’s identifier and the payload to the location service. The location service resolves the destination node’s identifier to its associated coordinates and uses BVR to route the payload to that node. We describe our design of the location service and briefly it’s implementation. We evaluate the location service and BVR in simulation and on a sensornet testbed, and compare our results to an existing point-topoint routing scheme for sensornets. In addition, a simplified distributed hash table is implemented on top of the location service and evaluated in simulation. 1