Improving Delivery Ratio and Power Efficiency in Unicast Geographic Routing with a Realistic Physical Layer for Wireless Sensor Networks

In the last few years, the amount of work in the field of routing algorithms for WSN has increased significantly. The special characteristics of WSN make a challenge for researchers to design efficient routing protocols. Nevertheless, most of the work done left out of scope an inherent aspect to WSN such as the radio transmission errors. The well-known unit disk graph model has been widely used as a basis for several routing protocol. However as recent experimental research has revealed, real links behave completely different to that model. In this paper we evaluate the problems that arise when considering that messages can be lost and propose a new geographic routing protocol which takes into account the probability of error transmission to achieve a high delivery ratio while reducing the energy consumed to the minimum possible. We present the results of the extensive simulation made using our protocol and compare it against a centralised version and two others previous work. Our protocol, being totally distributed and using only local information, outperforms the previous work and achieves almost the same results as the centralised version