An Effective Approach for Handling both Open and Closed Voids in Wireless Sensor Networks

• Main Authors: Mohamed AISSANI, Sofiane BOUZNAD, Abdelmalek HARIZA, Salah-Eddine ALLIA
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IFSA Publishing, S.L. 2012-03-01
• Series: Sensors & Transducers
• Subjects: Sensor networks; Geographical routing; Routing voids; Void-handling techniques
• Online Access: http://www.sensorsportal.com/HTML/DIGEST/march_2012/SENSORCOMM/P_SI_209.pdf

Closed voids are created within a deployed wireless sensor network (WSN), but open voids are often formed on the boundary of this network. Geographical routing protocols must handle these voids where packets fall into local minima. To contribute on resolving this problem, we propose in this paper an effective void-tolerant routing approach based on two mechanisms for handling any kind of void. Our approach uses simple and effective algorithms ensuring discovery and maintenance of voids in a WSN. Contrary to existing void-handling techniques, our proposal uses information of all voids for better orienting data packets toward their destination in optimal paths around the voids. Proposed approach has good performances in terms of packet delivery ratio, average routing path length, control packets overhead, energy of network and boundary nodes consumed per delivered packet, and average residual deadline of delivered packets.