EasyGo: Low-cost and robust geographic opportunistic sensing routing in a strip topology wireless sensor network

With the fast increasing popularity of smart device communication technologies, the wireless networks on mobile sensing applications have received much attention. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with a strip structure are ubiquitous in real world deployments, such as pipeline monitoring, water quality monitoring as well as Great Wall monitoring. However, the existing routing methods will select the next-hop node that deviates from the transmission direction to sink node in strip networks with high curvature, leading to the high communication failure rate and energy consumption. To this end, we propose a new geographic routing sensing opportunistic approach, named EasyGo, to cope with the routing problem, i.e., the transmission success rate decreases in the complicated strip networks. Specifically, by investigating the transmission direction, we propose a new candidate selection algorithm SLS, which introduces the concepts of layer slicing and virtual sinks to improve the transmission success rate in strip WSNs. Theoretical analysis and extensive simulations illustrate the high efficiency and transmission performance of the proposed EasyGo strategy for strip WSNs. Furthermore, we implement the EasyGo on the testbed with Z-Stack™ nodes. Compared with the classic algorithms, our EasyGo improves the transmission success rate by up to 10%, reduces the communication overhead and the energy consumption rate by up to 11.8% and 5%, respectively.