A Scalable and Energy Efficient Sink Location Service for Large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks
Rui Zhang ,Hang Zhao and Miguel A.Labrador
One important assumption made by most Location-Based Routing (LBR) protocols is the availability of a location service to find other nodes’ positions. Although several location mechanisms exist, most of them have been designed with mobile wireless ad hoc networks in mind or use some sort of flooding procedure, either network wide or more restricted in scope. In this paper, we introduce the Anchor Location Service (ALS), a quorum-based location service especially designed for large-scale wireless sensor networks that selects a set of nodes from a global virtual grid to provide sink location information without flooding the network. In addition, ALS includes mechanisms to avoid frequent and costly flooding procedures derived from the mobility of the sinks and targets, and utilizes face routing to guarantee message delivery and route around void areas. The location service is evaluated mathematically and by simulations, and compared with a well-known quorum-based routing scheme under different scenarios, such as varying the number of sinks and sources, the mobility of the sinks, the network area, and the density of the network. Our results demonstrate that ALS supports location-based routing in large-scale wireless sensor networks in a scalable and efficient manner. Compared with TTDD, ALS reduces the communication overhead by at least 50% in scenarios with multiple and moving sinks and targets.