Mobility-based Greedy Forwarding Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks

Geographic routing in mobile sensor networks has attracted attention in recent years. When a sensor node has a packet to forward, it selects the closest available neighbor to the sink as next forwarder regarding only location parameter. However, this strategy does not consider the mobility of sensor nodes. To overcome this problem, we propose in this paper an efficient geographic routing mechanism based on a new nexthop selection metric. It combines the distance to the sink, the moving direction and the moving speed of the forwarding candidate neighbors. This moving direction is based on neighbor evolution in distance according to the sink calculated by a sender node between two successive received location beacons. Associated with the well-known GPSR routing protocol, our mechanism achieved good performance in both delivering data packets and conserving resources of sensor nodes. Keywords—mobile sensor networks; geographic routing; sensor mobility; greedy forwarding.