Hole avoiding in advance routing with Hole Recovery mechanism in Wireless Sensor Networks

Hole (void) avoidance is a major issue when designing geographic routing protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). We proposed a novel Hole Avoiding In advance Routing protocol with Hole Recovery mechanism (HAIRHR) to address this issue. In the proposed protocol, a data packet can avoid meeting a "hole" in advance instead of bypassing a hole at the time when it meets the hole as existing Hole Avoiding Re-Routing protocols (HARR) do. We proved that the proposed protocol can always find a routing path between a given source node and the sink if such a routing path does exist in the network. In order to deal with the circumstance where the existing holes vanish or the new holes arise, the proposed "hole recovery" mechanism makes the routing protocol to be adaptive to the change of network topology. Simulation studies showed that the proposed protocol constructs routing paths very fast, with shorter routing distance and less energy consumption in comparison with existing HARR protocols. The proposed protocol can be used in large-scale WSNs. © 2012 Old City Publishing, Inc.