The effect of location errors on location based routing protocols in wireless sensor networks

Location-based routing protocols use position information for making packet forwarding decisions, assuming perfect location information. Unlike topological routing algorithms, they do not need to exchange and maintain routing information. They work nearly stateless. However, in practice there could be significant errors in obtaining location estimates.In this paper, the impact of location errors on power consumption of these protocols will be analyzed via developing a mathematical model represents the location errors that may occur in real deployment. Then a simulation of the power consumption of two location-based routing protocols, Geographic Random Forwarding (GeRaf) and Minimum Energy Consumption Forwarding (MECF), is carried out to evaluate the mathematical model.Both the obtained simulation results and the developed mathematical model show that this type of routing protocols suffers from substantial performance degradation in terms of power consumption in presence of location errors.