Hole plastic scheme for geographic routing in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Geographic routing in wireless sensor networks suffers from the local minimum problem when data packets encounter the concave boundary of a hole (void area), i.e., no neighbor node are closer to the destination than the current node. In this paper, we propose a hole plastic scheme which adaptively fill the concave area of a hole with potential stuck nodes according to 1-hop information of neighbors, to relieve the local minimum problem faced by geographic routing. The basic idea is To mark the nodes located in the concave area of the hole as potential stuck nodes which do not participate in data delivery unless a source/destination is located on the concave area of the hole. Once the hole plastic process is achieved, subsequently arriving data flows will be prevented from entering the concave area of the hole by potential stuck nodes. The proposed hole plastic scheme is achieved in a local self-organized manner, i.e., potential stuck node marking is based on the information of 1-hop neighbors, and traditional multi-hop cooperation methods such as hole detection, hole boundary tracing, hole modeling are not required.