Disjoint Multipath Scheme with Hole Detouring Strategy in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks consist of a large number of sensor nodes, recharging them is often infeasible. The failure of sensor nodes caused by energy exhaustion or physical destruction may lead to the reduction of sensor areas. In wireless sensor networks, holes can be formed due to void areas in sensor nodes deployment, destruction of sensor nodes, or uneven energy consumption. In such a network, geographic routing is very strong energy-efficient routing scheme without consideration of global network topology. But the hole problem becomes another difficult issue faced by geographic routing. Moreover, the holes make more serious obstacles in multipath routing, that is, multiple paths are eager to bypass the holes simultaneously. It results in more energy consumption or data collision on the edge of holes by the right hand rule and finally cannot construct disjoint multipath. In this paper, we propose the hole detouring strategy to handle the hole problem in disjoint multipath routing. Then our robust disjoint multipath routing scheme based on the hole detouring strategy can efficiently construct disjoint multipath preventing the hole problem and avoiding data collision on the edge of holes. Simulation results present our protocol is superior to the previous works in terms of energy consumption, average delivery delay and show reliable disjoint multipath construction under the hole flexibly.