  The greedy strategy of geographical routing may cause the local minimum
problem when there is a hole in the routing area. It depends on other
strategies such as perimeter routing to find a detour path, which can be long
and result in inefficiency of the routing protocol. In this paper, we propose a
new approach called Intermediate Target based Geographic Routing (ITGR) to
solve the long detour path problem. The basic idea is to use previous
experience to determine the destination areas that are shaded by the holes. The
novelty of the approach is that a single forwarding path can be used to
determine a shaded area that may cover many destination nodes. We design an
efficient method for the source to find out whether a destination node belongs
to a shaded area. The source then selects an intermediate node as the tentative
target and greedily forwards packets to it, which in turn forwards the packet
to the final destination by greedy routing. ITGR can combine multiple shaded
areas to improve the efficiency of representation and routing. We perform
simulations and demonstrate that ITGR significantly reduces the routing path
length, compared with existing geographic routing protocols.
