A hole detour scheme using virtual position based on residual energy for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of low powered nodes that need to operate for months unattended. Since modern WSNs are used in various applications, their topology is becoming complicated. Due to limited precision of deployment, holes may occur in the network, which often lead traditional Greedy Forwarding algorithms to fail. Thus, bypassing the holes is one of the important issues for WSNs. Since each node has limited energy, its energy consumption needs to be optimized to prolong network lifetime. In the well-known Virtual Position (ViP) scheme, each node routes data using virtual positions instead of actual geographic positions to improve the packet delivery rate. A Hole-bypassing Routing with Context-awareness scheme achieves balanced energy consumption by changing current path to one of the candidate paths, based on the residual energy of nodes. However, this scheme tends to extend the size of holes. Since existing hole detour schemes that do not consider efficient energy consumption, they cause imbalanced energy consumption and make network lifetime relatively shorter than other hole detour schemes. Similar to ViP, our scheme uses virtual positions to bypass holes. However, the virtual positions are computed using both geographic positions and the residual energies of neighbor nodes. Our approach outperforms the ViP scheme in terms of network lifetime and hole extension.