Zone Probabilistic Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

This article modeled the data routing problem in Wireless Sensor Networks as an in-zone random process. The data packets are randomly routed from the source to the sink within the defined RoutingZone via any-path. The proposed "Zone Probabilistic Routing (ZPR)" is a distributed probabilistic and randomized anycast routing protocol. In ZPR, the forwarding probability distribution is defined by multiplying the Four Probability Distributions (4PD) namely: direction, transmission distance, perpendicular distance, and residual energy. In order to meet different performance requirements for different applications, these probability distributions are completely controllable via a set of exponential control-parameters (direction control, transmission distance control, perpendicular distance control, and residual energy control). This set of parameters is user-oriented and can be modified prior to nodes deployment to achieve different performances. Through extensive simulations and experimental results, the optimal values for these exponential control-parameters have been obtained to meet different performance requirements in terms of energy consumption, energy balancing, network lifetime, and delay. Furthermore, through an extensive performance evaluation study and simulation of large-scale scenarios, the results showed that our proposed ZPR protocol achieved better performance compared to the state-of-the-art solutions in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, and data routing efficiency.