Load balanced routing with constant stretch for wireless sensor network with holes

Abstract

Because of its simplicity and scalability, geographic routing is a popular approach in wireless sensor networks, which can achieve a near-optimal routing path in the networks without of holes. With the occurrence of holes, however, geographic routing faces the problems of hole diffusion and routing path enlargement. Several recent proposals attempt to fix these issues by deploying a special, forbidding area around the hole, which helps to improve the congestion on the hole boundary but still causes significant load imbalancing due to static detour routes bypassing this fixed forbidding area. Also, a significant enlargement on routing path is still possible due to the possibly significant difference between this forbidding area and the hole. Another recent approach can achieve a low route stretch (constant bounded) but still, the load imbalancing due to the holes is a concern. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach which is the first to target and solve both these two problems of hole diffusion and path enlargement. Our theoretical analysis proves the constant stretch property and our simulation experiments show that our scheme strongly outperforms the existing schemes in several performance factors, including route stretch, efficient use of energy and load balancing.