PGRP: A probabilistic geocast routing protocol for virtual coordinate-based wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Geocast routing is an important application in wireless sensor networks (WNSs), especially for a scenario where sinks require to send messages to the nodes in a specific area of interest (AOI). This paper proposes a probabilistic geocast routing protocol, named PGRP, for virtual coordinate-based wire- less sensor networks (VC-WSNs). A VC-WSN is partitioned into different regions denoted by distinct directional codes and each node in a VC-WSN uses two geographical information, direction and distance, to represent its location. The main goal of PGRP is to determine candidate forwarders to relay received geocast packets. Each candidate forwarder in PGRP uses the proposed rules to self-determine its forwarding probability based on the level of vicinity to AOI and the distance to AOI. PGRP associates with a novel approach to quickly determine the above level so as to reduce computation overhead and consequently achieve energy saving. Simulation results show that, compared with a simple direction-based forwarding scheme, PGRP significantly increases the packet delivery ratio although slightly increasing the number of packets during packet transmission. Index Terms—Geocast routing, probabilistic, virtual coordi- nate.