Geographical and Energy Aware Routing: a recursive data dissemination protocol for wireless sensor networks

Future sensor networks will be composed of a large number of densely deployed sensors/actuators. A key feature of such networks is that their nodes are untethered and unattended. Consequently, energy efficiency is an important design consideration for these networks. Motivated by the fact that sensor network queries may often be geographical, we design and evaluate an energy efficient routing algorithm that propagates a query to the appropriate geographical region, without flooding. The proposed Geographic and Energy Aware Routing (GEAR) algorithm uses energy aware neighbor selection to route a packet towards the target region and Recursive Geographic Forwarding or Restricted Flooding algorithm to disseminate the packet inside the destination region. We evaluate the GEAR protocol using simulation. We find that, especially for non-uniform traffic distribution, GEAR exhibits noticeably longer network lifetime than non-energyaware geographic routing algorithms. 1