ORZBP: An Obstacle-Resistant Zone-based Broadcasting Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) comprise a few sink nodes and a large number of sensor nodes. The WSN environment contains unpredictable obstacles, such as mountains, lakes, buildings, or regions without any sensor node, impeding or blocking message relay. Broadcasting is an essential operation broadly used in WSNs. However, the blind flooding results in the large-scale waste of energy and bandwidth resources even though it is the simplest way to overcome obstacle-resistant problems. On the other hand, the blind flooding also raises the amount of packet collisions and contentions. This paper proposes a distributed obstacle resistant broadcasting protocol, called as ORZBP, to reduce the number of forwarding nodes and to overcome the obstacle problem. Experimental results reveal that ORZBP reduces the redundant bandwidth and power consumptions, avoids the possible packet collision as well as achieves the high success rate.