An energy-efficient routing protocol in wireless sensor networks with holes

In wireless sensor networks, holes may exist due to uneven deployment, energy exhaustion and physical obstacles. How to establish the energy-efficient routing mechanism in wireless sensor networks with holes is a practical and challenging issues. Many researches employ hole detection algorithm to determine boundary nodes, and then the holes are covered by some virtual shapes such as circles and ellipses. This usually leads to longer path length and more energy exhaustion. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient routing protocol in wireless sensor networks with holes. Only a few nodes need to determine whether it is a boundary node and a few anchor nodes are used to record the information of holes, thus reducing the energy consumption. In addition, the anchor nodes will be replaced when their residual energy is less than a threshold to prolong the network lifetime. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme has good performance in terms of energy consumption, control overhead and path length.