GEGR: A grid-based enabled geographic routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) provide high promises to a wide spectrum of application areas. However, routing packets in WSNs is still facing many obstacles, due to the special characteristics of WSNs. In this work, we propose an energy-efficient and low cost geographic routing algorithm for dense WSNs, called Grid-based Enabled Geographic Routing (GEGR). The proposed algorithm relies on the construction of a 2-D logical grid in the geographical region in which the sensor nodes are deployed. Packet forwarding is handled in each grid cell by an elected gateway node. The packet forwarding process depends on the relative location of the destination cell with respect to the source, and the geographic direction of forwarding. The proposed scheme limits the use of broadcasting in the WSN to the process of gateway election, and the process of constructing and maintaining the table of neighboring gateways in adjacent grid cells. Our simulation results show the effectiveness of our routing scheme and its ability to achieve network scalability compared to on-demand routing protocols.