A simple void node and loop‐free three‐dimensional routing protocol for multi‐hop wireless networks

Abstract

SummaryWireless networks are now very essential part for modern ubiquitous communication systems. The design of efficient routing and scheduling techniques for such networks have gained importance to ensure reliable communication. Most of the currently proposed geographic routing protocols are designed for 2D spatial distribution of user nodes, although in many practical scenarios user nodes may be deployed in 3D space also. In this paper, we propose 3D routing protocols for multihop wireless networks that may be implemented in two different ways depending on how the routing paths are computed. When the routing paths to different user nodes from the base station in the wireless network are computed by the base station, we call it centralized protocol (3DMA‐CS). A distributed routing (3DMA‐DS) protocol is implemented when respective routing path of each user node to the base station is computed by the user node. In both of these protocols, the user (base station) selects the relay node to forward packets in the direction of destination, from the set of its neighbours, which makes minimum angle with the reference line drawn from user (base station) to the base station (user), within its transmission range. The proposed protocols are free from looping problem and can solve the void node problem (VNP) of multihop wireless networks. Performance analysis of the proposed protocol is shown by calculating end‐to‐end throughput, average path length, end‐to‐end delay, and energy consumption of each routing path through extensive simulation under different network densities and transmission ranges.