TRENS: A Tracking-Assisted Routing Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have been proposed as a promising technology employed for tracking target and observing environment. Since the targets and sinks could move anywhere at any time, how to efficiently trace the positions of targets and sinks and route the sensing data from the targets to the sinks poses significant design challenges of a well-behavior routing scheme in WSNs. Moreover, sensor nodes are often operated under energy-constrained situation, thus, reducing energy consumption of each node to extend network lifetime is also an important issue. In this paper, we present a novel routing scheme, named TRENS, to solve the above problem. TRENS is based on the visual-grid structure and uses tracking technology to assist the routing procedure for routing traffic efficiently while reducing power dissipation. Additionally, TRENS introduces a shortcutting scheme to optimize the routing paths for decreasing communication cost and latency. We compare the performance of TRENS with previous schemes by performing extensive simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed architecture conserves energy efficiently and achieves much better performance.