An Anti-void Geographic Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have attracted great attention in research and industrial development due to their fast-growing application potentials. Most of the existing geographic routing algorithms for wireless sensor networks are based on maintaining one-hop neighbors on the sensor node, leading to a well-known void problem. In this paper, we demonstrate that we can improve routing performance by storing more neighbors (called spatial neighbors) on the sensor nodes so as to avoid the void problem. We propose a neighborhood discovery algorithm and a neighborhood maintenance strategy to collect and maintain the spatial neighbors for each node. Based on the spatial neighbors on each node, we propose an Anti-Void Geographic Routing algorithm. Simulation results show that the AVGR routing algorithm outperforms the typical routing algorithm GPG/GPSR, especially in networks with more voids.