Life (and routing) on the Wireless Manifold

Abstract

We present the wireless manifold, a 2-dimensional surface in 3-dimensional space with the property that geodesic distances accurately capture wireless signal strengths. A compact representation of the manifold can be reconstructed from a sparse set of signal measurements. The manifold distance suggests a simple routing algorithm that avoids obstacles, naturally handles mobile nodes without explicitly maintaining the connectivity graph and is more efficient compared to using Euclidean distance as measured by success rate, routing load and failure tolerance. Placing sensors to cover the manifold is more effective than covering the underlying physical space.