Forwarding via checkpoints: Geographic routing on always-on sensors

Data forwarding is an essential function in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It is well-known that geographic forwarding is an efficient scheme for WSNs as it requires maintaining only local topology information to forward data to a central gathering point, called the sink (or base station), for further analysis and processing. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient data forwarding protocol for WSNs, called Weighted Localized Delaunay Triangulation-based data forwarding (WLDT), with a goal to extending the network lifetime. Specifically, WLDT selects as forwarders the sensors with high remaining energy and whose locations lie nearer the shortest path between source sensors and a single sink, thus helping the sensors minimize their average energy consumption. More precisely, WLDT defines checkpoints to build energy-efficient data forwarding paths and uses a 1-lookahead scheme to guarantee data delivery to the sink. We show that WLDT, which favors data forwarding through short Delaunay edges, achieves an energy gain percentage in the order of 55% for the free space model and close to 100% for the multi-path model compared to BVGF and GPSR, which forward data through long distances and which we have slightly updated to account for energy in the selection of next forwarders. We prove that these checkpoints yield an energy gain percentage in the order of 30% in comparison with a similar protocol, called WLDT-w/c (or WLDT without checkpoints), which forwards data via short distances but does not use checkpoints.