Exploiting Local Knowledge to Enhance Energy-Efficient Geographic Routing

Geographic routing is one of the most widely-accepted techniques to route information in large-scale wireless sensor networks. It is based on a greedy forwarding strategy by which a sensor node selects as next hop relay the most promising neighbor (according to some metric) among those being closer to the destination than itself. This decision is based solely on the position of its neighbors and the destination. Given that sensor nodes are usually operated by batteries, energy-efficiency is a very important metric to be considered by the routing protocol. In this paper we present Locally-Optimal Source Routing (LOSR), a new localized and energy-efficient geographic routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks. Unlike existing energy-efficient geographic routing algorithms, in which current node routing the packet only considers nodes closer to destination than itself, LOSR uses all nodes in the neighborhood to compute a local energy-optimal path formed only by neighbors of the current node towards the selected next hop. Then, source routing is used to force data packets to follow that locally optimal path until next hop is reached. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the best existing solution, over a variety of network densities and scenarios.