Energy Efficient Geographic Routing Robust Against Location Errors

Abstract

Realistic geographic routing algorithms need to ensure quality of services in wireless sensor network applications while being resilient to the inherent localization errors of positioning algorithms. A number of solutions robust against location errors have been proposed in the literature and their design focuses either on a high throughput or on a balanced energy consumption. Ideally, both aspects need to be addressed by the same algorithm, but in most cases, the proposed routing techniques compromise between the two. The present work aims to minimize such a tradeoff and to facilitate a higher packet delivery ratio than similar geographic routing techniques, while still being energy efficient. This is achieved through a novel proposal entitled energy conditioned mean square error algorithm (ECMSE), which makes use of statistical assumptions of Gaussianly distributed location error and Ricianly distributed distances between sensor nodes. In addition, it makes use of an energy efficient feature, which includes information about the energy cost of the forwarding decision. By using a location-error-resilient and distance-based power metric, the ECMSE provides an improved performance in realistic simulations in comparison with other error-coping geographic routing algorithms.