ELBAR: efficient load balanced routing scheme for wireless sensor networks with holes

  • Authors:
  • Nguyen Phi Le;Nguyen Trung Hieu;Nguyen Khanh Van

  • Affiliations:
  • Ha Noi University of Science and Technology, Ha Noi, Viet Nam;Ha Noi University of Science and Technology, Ha Noi, Viet Nam;Ha Noi University of Science and Technology, Ha Noi, Viet Nam

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Information and Communication Technology
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

A critical issue in designing efficient routing algorithms for wireless sensor networks (WSN) is dealing with holes which do occur due to several reasons, including cases caused by natural obstacles or disaster suffered areas. Traditional solutions utilize perimeter routing techniques that however lead to traffic concentration on the nodes on the hole boundary, which can make these nodes getting energy exhausted and the hole enlarging, consequently. Several recent proposals attempt to fix this by deploying a special, forbidding area around the hole, which helps to improve path length but still causes significant load unbalancing due to the fixed shape of this forbidding area. We introduce a novel approach in dealing with routing holes where the packet forwarder node notices early enough about the occurrence of a hole in the direction to the destination and hence, can "bend" the path around this hole efficiently. This can be done by deploying a hole aware area around the hole where each node maintains an angle of its view to this hole. We achieve this hole awareness mechanism by using an economical learn-and-disseminate strategy where the nodes on a hole's boundary learn and create a core shape of the hole and then economically disseminate this information piece to the surrounding neighborhood of a controlled size wherein each node then compute and store its hole-view angle. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed routing scheme is the first one that targets and achieves both the two requirements of energy efficiency and load balancing in dealing with the occurrence of holes. Our simulation experiments show that our scheme strongly outperforms several important existing schemes in several performance factors, including route length, efficient use of energy and load balancing.