Flattening the gap between source-destination paths in energy efficient greedy georouting in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in simple routing protocols, for wireless sensor networks. One of the major challenging issue in sensor networks is that nodes rely on batteries with limited capacity. Therefore, to extend the life of the sensors and the reliability of the network, an efficient routing algorithm can reduce/optimize energy consumption by reducing routing overhead while maintaining a high delivery rate. Moreover, a good routing method should compute a routing path that is as close as possible to the shortest path. We propose ORouting, a localized energy efficient greedy routing scheme. To minimize the gap between the shortest path and the computed path, ORouting computes its routing path by locally selecting the next hop node based on its orthogonal distance to the direction of the source/destination pair. Moreover, in its routing decision, ORouting is biased towards its neighbors in the forward direction towards the destination. We compare ORouting to several routing protocols. We show, through simulation, that our protocol improves significantly energy consumption and achieves a high percentage of successful routings. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.