Straight forwarding in WSNs with the virtual convex polygon approach

Applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) experience the "local minimum phenomenon." This is caused by deployment holes and blocks forwarding process. Recent noteworthy schemes, such as SLGF, Virtual Ellipse, and Virtual Circle, have been proposed to bypass holes. However, they still have a long routing path. In this paper, we introduce a Virtual Convex Polygon approach in which the hole boundary information is transferred to a subset of nodes. After that, the best approximation convex shape, i.e., the virtual convex polygon, is built based on this information. The shorter distance path of the clockwise side and counterclockwise side paths is chosen to combine with a dynamic forwarder selection procedure to construct the final routing path for bypassing the hole. Comprehensive computer simulations show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the number of hops and the length of the routing path by 34% shorter than SLGF, 29% shorter than Virtual Ellipse, and 20% shorter than Virtual Circle. It also achieves a high delivery ratio and increases the number of data transfers.