A geographic cross-layer routing adapted for disaster relief operations in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been studied for various applications, especially for facilitating relief operations in disasters such as earthquake and fire. In this paper, we propose a new geographic cross-layer routing method in WSNs called geographic cross-layer routing adapted for disaster (GCRAD) relief operations. GCRAD integrates MAC and routing using a handshake mechanism for relay selection and considers node's queue status, distance to the sink, and the number of potential relay nodes as the relay selection criteria. GCRAD eliminates the ineffective transmissions and shortens the handshake mechanism by affecting these criteria in a single step (all of them concurrently) and also, decreases the collision probability as much as possible. Through ns2-based simulations, we show that GCRAD significantly achieves lower end-to-end delay, lower energy consumption, and acceptable delivery ratio in comparison with the state-of-the-art geographic cross-layer routing methods, especially in high traffics, which is the main characteristic of disasters.