A Grid-Based Distributed Multi-Hop Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

High delivery ratio with low energy consumption and transmission delay is one of design challenges for wireless sensor network routing protocol. In this paper, we proposed a grid-based distributed multi-hop routing protocol (GDRP) for wireless sensor network. At one time there is only one node is selected as grid head per grid and the remaining nodes perform grid head tasks by rotating dynamically. For the sake of decreasing the energy consumed by grid heads, the inter-grid communication uses multi-hop routing pattern. In GDRP each grid head executes a distributed algorithm and chooses an optimal next h-hop routing path independently according to the routing cost, distance and residual energy of neighboring grid heads. The experiment results show GDRP balances energy consumption well, thus leads to a high data delivery ratio, low transmission delay and prolonged network lifetime.