Gradient-based micro sensor routing protocol in wireless sensor networks

In most of existing routing protocols of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a route is set up through broadcasting the route request (RREQ) messages throughout the entire network, which often brings broadcast storm. In this paper, we propose a new gradient-based micro sensor routing protocol (GMSRP) to alleviate the broadcast storm. With the GMSRP, during the network initialization, the sink node broadcasts a GRAI (gradient information) message to the entire network and with the message each sensor node can learn its gradient information, which is the minimal number of hops away from the sink node. Later, when a sensor node launches the route discovery procedure with the GMSRP, the RREQ messages will be forwarded with limited broadcasting scheme by each middle sensor node. Finally, we develop the GSMRP routing module in NS-2 and conduct detail experiments. The experiment results show that the GMSRP improves the routing performance significantly comparing with the classical routing protocol AODV.