  More and more critical Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications are
emerging. Those applications need reliability and respect of time constraints.
The underlying mechanisms such as MAC and routing must handle such
requirements. Our approach to the time constraint problem is to bound the
hop-count between a node and the sink and the time it takes to do a hop so the
end-to-end delay can be bounded and the communications are thus real-time. For
reliability purpose we propose to select forwarder nodes depending on how they
are connected in the direction of the sink. In order to be able to do so we
need a coordinate (or a metric) that gives information on hop-count, that
allows to strongly differentiate nodes and gives information on the
connectivity of each node keeping in mind the intrinsic constraints of WSWs
such as energy consumption, autonomy, etc. Due to the efficiency and
scalability of greedy routing in WSNs and the financial cost of GPS chips,
Virtual Coordinate Systems (VCSs) for WSNs have been proposed. A category of
VCSs is based on the hop-count from the sink, this scheme leads to many nodes
having the same coordinate. The main advantage of this system is that the hops
number of a packet from a source to the sink is known. Nevertheless, it does
not allow to differentiate the nodes with the same hop-count. In this report we
propose a novel hop-count-based VCS which aims at classifying the nodes having
the same hop-count depending on their connectivity and at differentiating nodes
in a 2-hop neighborhood. Those properties make the coordinates, which also can
be viewed as a local identifier, a very powerful metric which can be used in
WSNs mechanisms.
