A Preventive Rerouting Scheme for Avoiding Voids in Wireless Sensor Networks

We propose in this paper an efficient void-avoidance scheme based on a novel approach to prevent data packets from meeting boundaries of voids. In our approach, the choice of the forwarding region around a discovered void is based on the locations of the sender node, of the void center and of the destination node. The first stuck node which detects a void launches a void-discovery algorithm and communicates the void center to all nodes located n-hops away from the void boundary. These nodes will launch a preventive rerouting process, by selecting the appropriate forwarding region around the void, to forward each data packet before reaching the boundary nodes. Associated to the well-known real-time routing protocol SPEED, the proposed scheme provides good performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, communication energy consumption, and control overhead.