On-demand Geographic Forwarding for data delivery in wireless sensor networks

A purely on-demand network protocol, called On-demand Geographic Forwarding (OGF), is proposed for data delivery in large-scale and resource-constrained static wireless sensor networks with unreliable sensors. OGF is a cross-layer protocol that employs (i) an explicit contention scheme to establish a next-hop node in a distributed fashion, (ii) a simple scheme using a forwarding table to maintain the learned next-hop information, and (iii) a novel partial source routing scheme to handle communication voids. The operation of our protocol is based on the actual demands of the application, data traffic, and network dynamics. Packet-level simulations show that OGF exhibits a superior performance in terms of energy consumption, scalability, and void handling. Our study demonstrates that OGF is viable for efficient data delivery in the targeted sensor networks.