JLR: Joint localization and routing for energy balance and obstacle resistence in WSNs

Recently, many location-aware routing protocols have been proposed to overcome the obstacles and construct the shortest route which minimizes the end-to-end delay and saves overheads for packet forwarding. However, most of them require accurate location information which is difficult to obtain. Another problem of existing location aware routing is that the sensor nodes located on the best route will frequently execute the packet forwarding and result in an energy-unbalanced problem. This phenomenon is especially significant when the WSNs contain obstacle. It is because that the border nodes around the obstacle are always in charge of packet forwarding. Joint consideration of localization and routing mechanism can improve the routing performance since the development of routing mechanism should take into consideration the degree of inaccurate location information which is determined by localization mechanism. This paper proposes a localization algorithm that uses mobile sensor with direction antenna to guarantee a specific accurate level of location information. A novel routing protocol which takes both energy balance and obstacle resistance issues into consideration is proposed to work with the proposed localization mechanism. To the best of our knowledge, this is the pilot study that integrates localization and routing mechanisms and considers both energy balance and obstacle resistance issues based on an environment with inaccurate location information. Performance study shows that the proposed routing protocol outperforms other existing routing protocols in terms of energy balancing and packet delivery ratio.