Constant stretch and load balanced routing protocol for bypassing multiple holes in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The occurrence of multiple holes in wireless sensor networks poses many challenges in designing routing protocols. The traditional scheme is forwarding packets along the hole perimeters. However, this scheme leads to two serious problems: data concentration around the hole boundaries and routing path enlargement Recently, several approaches have been proposed to address these two problems, wherein a common idea is to form forbidden areas around the holes from which packets are kept to stay away. However, due to the static nature of the forbidden areas and routing paths, the existing protocols cannot solve these two problems thoroughly. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol for bypassing multiple holes in wireless sensor networks which can balance the traffic over the network while ensuring the constant stretch property of the routing path. Our main idea is to use elastic forbidden areas and dynamic routing paths. The theoretical analysis proves that the routing path stretch of the proposed protocol can be controlled to be as small as 1 + ∊ (for any predefined ∊ > 0), and the simulation experiments show that our protocol strongly outperforms state-of-the-art protocols in terms of load balancing.