Efficient route update protocol for wireless sensor networks

In larger-scale sensor networks, sink or target mobility brings new challenges in route maintenance and update. Conventional routing approaches suggest re-constructing a new route using flooding based protocols or simply repairing the old route locally. The flooding based scheme introduces lots of unnecessary control traffic, thus wasting sensor power and channel bandwidth. The local route repair leads to an excessively long route when the sink or the target keeps on moving. In this paper we propose an efficient route update protocol (ERUP) to localize the flooding of route update messages within the neighborhood of the old route. By using this new scheme, we assure route-wide renovation to maintain the freshness and short length of the new route, and at the same time, we greatly reduce the route update traffic with the help of the old route. Our simulations show that ERUP can always build a shorter and fresher route with very low control traffic compared with conventional approaches, which is beneficial to the energy conserving and balancing of the whole network.