Congestion Aware Geographic Routing Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

Geographic routing protocols forward packets according to the geographical locations of nodes. Thus, the criteria used to select a forwarding node impacts on the performance of the protocols such as energy efficiency and end-to-end transmission delay. In this paper, we propose a congestion aware forwarder selection (CAFS) method for a geographic routing protocol. To design CAFS, we devise a cost function by combining not only the forward progress made to a packet but also the amount of energy required for packet forwarding, forwarding direction, and congestion levels of potential forwarders. Among the potential forwarders, CAFS selects the next forwarder having the minimum cost. In our simulation studies, we compare the performance of CAFS with those of the maximum progress (MP) method and the cost over progress (CoP) method in various network conditions. The results show that compared with MP, the length of a routing path in terms of the number of hops becomes longer when CAFS is used. However, the shorter hop distance helps to avoid unnecessary retransmissions caused by packet loss in a wireless channel. In addition, since CAFS considers congestion levels of candidate forwarders, it reduces the queuing delay in each forwarder. Therefore, CAFS is superior to the MP and the CoP in terms of the energy consumption, end-to-end packet transfer delay, and the successful packet delivery rate.