Anchor Node Based Sink Location Dissemination Scheme for Geographic Routing

Geographic routing is attractive in wireless sensor networks especially for scalability, as it is possible to scale the network size without increasing the signaling overhead, because routing decisions are inherently localized. Geographic routing requires the sources nodes to be aware of the location of the sinks. Most of existing geographic routing protocols merely assume that the sources can get the location of sinks by some location service. How can source nodes obtain the location of sinks is not addressed in detail. In this paper, we propose an anchor node based sink location dissemination scheme for geographic routing in wireless sensor networks. In this scheme, a source node and a sink node send sink location announcement and query messages along two paths respectively by geographic routing. The node located on the crossing point of the two paths informs the source about the sink location. The challenge of this paper is that how to guarantee these two paths having at least one crossing point in any irregular profile of sensor network. Simulation results show that our protocol is significantly superior to other protocols in terms of energy consumption and control overhead.