An edge nodes energy efficient hole modeling in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are composed of a great deal of energy restricted sensor nodes and targets (events) at long-term usage such as environment monitoring. The failure of sensor nodes caused by energy exhaustion or physical destruction may lead to the reduction of sensor areas. In the wireless sensor networks, the nodes located on the edge of holes are relatively weaker than other sensor nodes since the geographic routing scheme tends to route data packets along the edge of holes by the right hand rule. It results in more energy consumption or even exhausts the energy of the hole edge nodes, so it may enlarge the holes. We call this, a hole diffusion problem. The right hand rule may also lead to data collisions on the hole edge nodes if multiple communication sessions need to bypass a hole simultaneously. In this paper, we propose hole modeling to handle the hole problem in wireless sensor networks. Our hole modeling can efficiently prevent the hole diffusion, avoid the local minimum faced by geographic routing protocols, and reduce data collisions on the hole edge nodes. Simulation results present our protocol is superior to the previous works in terms of control overhead, average delivery delay and energy consumption.