Sink Location Service for Geographic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Geographic routing has been considered as an efficient, simple, and scalable routing protocol for wireless sensor networks since it exploits pure location information instead of global topology information to route data packets. Geographic routing requires the sources nodes to be aware of the location of the sinks. How can source nodes get sinks locations with low overhead is a difficult issue in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a Sink Location Service for geographic routing in wireless Sensor Networks. In this scheme, a source node and a sink node send sink location announcement and query messages along two paths respectively by geographic routing. The node located on the crossing point of the two paths informs the source about the sink location. Then the source can send data packet to the sink by geographic routing. How to guarantee that these two paths have at least one crossing point in any irregular profile of sensor network is the challenge of this paper. Simulation results show that our protocol is significantly superior to other protocols in terms of energy consumption and control overhead.