Restricted Linear Flooding Scheme to Obtain Sink Location in Wireless Sensor Networks

Geographic routing has been considered as an energy efficient and simple routing protocol for wireless sensor networks. It utilizes only geographical location information without global network structures to route data packets. To take these advantages of geographic routing, a source node should be aware of the location of a sink node. Methods that the source node efficiently obtains the sink location information, however, have been scantily studied yet. In this paper, we propose a restricted linear flooding scheme to obtain sink location in wireless sensor networks. The source node sends location query message and the sink node sends location announcement message to specified direction respectively. The node located on a crossing point of these two message forwarding paths informs the source node about the sink location information. Then the source node sends data to the sink node by geographic routing. The proposed scheme also constructs a virtual restricted linear flooding zone inside the network to guarantee the existence of the crossing point. Simulation results show that proposed scheme is more efficient in terms of energy consumption than existing protocols.