Efficient Hole Detour Scheme for Geographic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Geographic routing has been addressed in many literatures of ad hoc sensor networks due to its efficiency and scalability. Void areas (holes) bring Geographic routing some problems such as data congestion and excessive energy consumption of hole boundary nodes. Holes are hardly avoided in wireless sensor networks due to various actual geographical environments, e.g., puddles, buildings or obstacles, or uneven energy consumption, even physical destruction. To bypass a hole, most existing geographic routing protocols tend to route data packets along the boundary of the hole by perimeter routing scheme. This scheme, on one hand, consumes more energy of the nodes on the boundary of the hole, thus possibly enlarging the hole, we call this hole diffusion problem; on the other hand, it may incur data congestion if multiple communication sessions are bypassing the hole simultaneously. In this paper, we propose efficient hole detour scheme to solve the hole problems faced by geographic routing in wireless sensor networks. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol is superior to other protocols in terms of packet deliver ratio, control overhead, average delivery delay, and energy consumption.