An ellipse-guided routing algorithm in wireless sensor networks

Abstract In wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes are deployed to collect data, perform calculations, and forward information to either other nodes or sink nodes. Recently, geographic routing has become extremely popular because it only requires the locations of sensor nodes and is very efficient. However, the local minimum phenomenon, which hinders greedy forwarding, is a major problem in geographic routing. This phenomenon is attributed to an area called a hole that lacks active sensors, which either prevents the packet from being forwarded to a destination node or produces a long detour path. In order to solve the hole problem, mechanisms to detect holes and determine landmark nodes have been proposed. Following the proposed mechanisms, landmark-based routing was developed in which the source node first sends a packet to the landmark node, and the landmark node then sends the packet to the destination. However, this approach often creates a constant node sequence, causing nodes that perform routing tasks to quickly run out of energy thus producing larger holes. In this paper, a new approach is proposed in which two virtual ellipses are created with the source, landmark, and destination nodes. Forwarding is then guided along virtual ellipses. Furthermore, a recursive algorithm is designed to ensure a shortcut even if there are multiple holes or a hole has multiple landmarks. Thus, the proposed approach improves both geographic routing and energy efficiency routing. Simulation experiments show that the proposed approach increases the battery life of sensor nodes, lowers the end-to-end delay, and generates a short path.