An optimal geographic routing protocol based on honeycomb architecture in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

For Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), minimization of energy consumption has major challenge as it directly corresponds to the network lifetime. In WSNs, geographic adaptive fidelity (GAF) is one of the most energy efficient location based protocols which extends the lifetime by identifying equivalence between sensors using geographic location information and then keeping unnecessary sensors in sleep state, while maintaining application fidelity. However, traditional GAF still cannot reach to the optimum energy usage since it needs more hop count to transmit data packets to the sink. As a result, it also leads to higher energy usage due to participation of more sensors. In this paper, a modified version of traditional GAF is proposed to minimize the total hop count. Furthermore, we propose to use the honeycomb virtual grid called GAF-HEX to replace to the square grid with hexagonal grids. Simulation results prove that the proposed scheme outperforms traditional GAF in terms of total hop count and energy conservation. As a result, compared to traditional GAF-HEX, it needs 38% to 45% less hop count and consumes 22% to 28% less energy to prolong the network lifetime.