Quorum based sink location service for irregular wireless sensor networks

Geographic routing has been considered as an efficient, simple, and scalable routing protocol for wireless sensor networks since it exploits pure location information instead of global topology information to route data packets. Geographic routing requires a source node to be aware of the location of a sink. Most existing geographic routing protocols merely assume that the sources can obtain the location of sink by some location service. How can source node efficiently obtain the location of sink is not addressed in detail. In this paper, we propose a quorum based sink location service (QSLS) for irregular profile wireless sensor networks. In this scheme, a sink location announcement packet and a sink location query packet are sent along two trajectories respectively by geographic routing. The node which overheard these two packets near the intersection of the two trajectories informs the source about the sink location. Then the source can send data packets to the sink by geographic routing. The challenge of this paper is that how to guarantee these two trajectories having at least one intersection in arbitrary irregular profile sensor networks. Simulation results show that QSLS is significantly superior to other protocols in terms of control overhead.