Parabola based Geographic Forwarding in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Due to power and communication capability limitations, communication between a source node and a destination node in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) that are not within each other's direct communication range needs to rely on the forwarding of other nodes.When it comes to the routing problem in WSNs with a void area (which is a hole that lacks of active nodes), researchers have proposed a variety of mechanisms.One of the solutions is to create a path along the perimeter of a geometric shape.However, it often results in long detour path although some nodes that can create a much short path exist.A improved solution is to find a landmark node.This method first finds a routing path from the source to the landmark, and then develops a routing path from the landmark to the destination.This method avoids long detour paths during forwarding.However, the selected forwarding nodes are mechanically fixed.These nodes suffer from a much higher traffic load, which results in a shorter lifetime and thus creates a larger void area.This article presents a mechanism based on virtual parabola generated using the locations of the source, the landmark, and the destination prior to the routing.During the forwarding process, more nodes will be evenly chosen based on the virtual parabola.Because of that, the new proposed scheme finds short routing path while maintaining more balanced energy consumption.The performance of the new proposed method is evaluated through simulations.The results demonstrate that the approach made improvement compared with both existing methods.