An Angular 3D Path Selection Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract Geographical routing is an area of interest for wireless sensor networks because of its scalability and local decision making capability. Usually, geographical routing protocols rely on greedy approach and suffer from the void node problem (VNP). This paper presents an angular three-dimensional routing protocol (A3DR) for wireless sensor networks. In A3DR, the next hop is selected from nodes available in solid angle decided dynamically based on network density, i.e., larger solid angle for sparse networks while a smaller angle for dense one. The delay based contention mechanism has been proposed to select a suitable forwarding node among nodes lying in a particular solid angle. A3DR has a provision to adaptively tune the solid angle to resolve the void node problem. Further, the proposed protocol A3DR will take care of traffic congestion problem suffered by beaconless routing protocol. The A3DR tackle the concave void problem by allowing conditional backtracking to find another suitable path and prevent looping. Additionally, A3DR address overhear problem by utilizing the concept of request-to-forward and clear-to-forward for the nodes lying outside the solid angle 60°. The performance of proposed A3DR is compared with existing protocols by implementing it on the INET framework under OMNET++ simulator. The simulation results indicate that A3DR achieves a high packet reception rate while maximizing the residual energy and minimizing traffic overhead.