Distributed load balancing mechanism for detouring schemes of geographic routing in wireless sensor networks

Well-known ‘routing hole’ problem of geographic routing is hardly avoided in wireless sensor networks because of various actual geographical environments. Existing geographic routing protocols use perimeter routing strategies to find a detour path around the boundary of holes when they encounter the localminimum during greedy forwarding. However, this solution may lead to uneven energy consumption around the holes since it consumes more energy of the boundary sensors. It becomes more serious when holes appear in most of routing paths in a large-scale sensor network. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed strategy to balance the traffic load on the boundary of holes by virtually changing the sizes of these holes. The proposed mechanism dynamically controls holes to expand and shrink circularly without changing the underlying forwarding strategy. Therefore, it can be applied to most of the existing geographic routing protocols which detour around holes. Simulation results show that our strategy can effectively balance the load around holes, thus prolonging the network life of sensor networks when an existing geographic routing protocol is used as the underlying routing protocol.