Density-based routing mechanism for sensor networks

The main concern of sensor networks is to maintain full coverage of the monitoring areas, not to keep each node alive as long as possible. That is, it is not necessary to keep nodes alive if they are replaceable by their surrounding nodes and the full coverage is still maintained. Thus, we argue that the objective of designing an energy-aware route selection protocol is to prolong the monitoring lifetime of sensor networks, or the duration that sensor networks may maintain full coverage of the monitoring areas, not the power lifetime of individual nodes. In this paper, we propose a density-based route selection protocol, DBR, and introduce a new metric, potential energy, to be used to select the routes that pass through the highly replaceable nodes. We also conduct a simulation to compare DBR with two existing route selection protocols, MTPR and MMBCR, and the result is satisfactory. DBR outperforms MTPR significantly in almost every case, and is better than MMBCR in most cases while slightly worse in some cases.