Energy-Aware and Time-Critical Geo-Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Volunteer forwarding, as an emerging routing idea for large scale, location-aware wireless sensor networks, has recently received significant attention. However, several critical research issues raised by volunteer forwarding, including communication collisions, communication voids, and time-critical routing, have not been well addressed by the existing work. In this paper, we propose a priority-based stateless geo-routing (PSGR) protocol that addresses these issues. Based on PSGR, sensor nodes are able to locally determine their priority to serve as the next relay node using dynamically estimated network density. This effectively suppresses potential communication collisions without prolonging routing delays. PSGR also overcomes the communication void problem using two alternative stateless schemes, rebroadcast and bypass. Meanwhile, PSGR supports routing of time-critical packets with different deadline requirements at no extra communication cost. Additionally, we analyze the energy consumption and the delivery rate of PSGR as functions of the transmission range. Finally, an extensive performance evaluation has been conducted to compare PSGR with competing protocols, including GeRaf, IGF, GPSR, flooding, and MSPEED. Simulation results show that PSGR exhibits superior performance in terms of energy consumption, routing latency, and delivery rate, and soundly outperforms all of the compared protocols.