RGP: Active Route Guiding Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks with Obstacles

In wireless sensor networks, a geographic region without functionality of sensing and communication can be generally treated as an obstacle, which significantly impacts the performance of existing location-based routing. In a WSN, an obstacle can be dynamically formed due to unbalanced deployment, failure or power exhaustion of sensors, animus interference, or physical obstacles such as mountains or buildings. This paper proposes a novel algorithm, namely RGP, to enable the existing location-based routing protocols resisting obstacles. Applying the proposed RGP, border nodes that surround the obstacles will actively establish a forbidden region for concave obstacles and make the obstacle information transparent. Then packets will be guided to overcome the obstacle and move along the shortest path from the encountered border node to the sink node. Simulation results show that RGP creates low overhead and significantly reduces the average route length and therefore improves the energy consumption and end-to-end delay for a wireless sensor network with obstacles