Surviving holes and barriers in geographic data reporting for Wireless Sensor Networks

Geographic forwarding is a favorable scheme for data reporting in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) due to its simplicity and low-overhead. However, WSNs are usually subject to complicated environmental factors. Network holes (i.e., the areas where no nodes inside) and barriers (i.e., those blocking the communication between two close nodes) are inevitable in practical deploying environments. These issues pose an obstacle to adopting geographic forwarding in WSNs, while current approaches lack an efficient method to tolerate such negative factors. In this paper we specifically tailor a waypoint-based geographic data reporting protocol (GDRP) for WSNs. Inherited from geographic forwarding, GDRP is light-weighted and hence well-suits WSNs. But unlike current approaches that often find suboptimal paths, GDRP adopts an intelligent strategy to select a best set of waypoints via which packets can efficiently circumvent holes and barriers, and it can thus find better paths. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify the advantages of GDRP in tolerating network holes and obstacles in WSNs.