ABC: A simple geographic forwarding scheme capable of bypassing routing holes in sensor networks

In this paper, to achieve fast and energy-efficient message delivery in multi-hop wireless sensor networks, we propose ABC, a simple geographic forwarding scheme capable of bypassing routing holes. ABC is a lightweight and reliable routing protocol in that nodes do not need to set up or maintain routing or neighbor tables; instead, ABC achieves lightweight routing via its “Angled relaying” mechanism and uses the “Backoff time and relay Cancellation” mechanism to reduce contention and the number of retransmissions. One of the main features of ABC is a message based implicit ACK mechanism where a relayed message is used as an implicit ACK to a previous sender, avoiding an explicit RTS/CTS. Another main feature of ABC is its on-demand routing hole bypassing mechanism based on reactive boundary recognition. In this paper we provide an extensive analysis of ABC in terms of average hop count and average delay per hop. Simulation results also show that ABC outperforms other protocols in terms of average delay and number of transmissions per message delivery.