A Swing Routing Approach to Improve Performance of Shortest Geographical Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The advances of the wireless sensor network (WSN) has brought the development of many applications in various fields such as environment, military, traffic monitoring systems, etc. The WSN network consists of a sink node and a vast number of sensor nodes that are spatially distributed. Sensor nodes have limitations in computing and battery, so effective routing protocols are needed to extend network lifetime. One of the frequently used routing protocols in WSN is Shortest Geographical Routing (SGP). Shortest geographical routing approach employs the hop-by-hop concept by utilizing neighboring nodes to forward data to the sink node. This fact may produce unbalance network load especially to the sensor nodes around the sink node will be busier than other nodes, causing the battery node to run out faster. To address this issue, we propose the swing routing approach to balance the network load and maintain the packet delivery ratio. This development is expected to be able to carry out the routing function by selecting the right and balanced traffic at distributed sensor nodes in the network. These approach aims to increase the WSN network lifetime and packet delivery ratio, minimizing the number of dead nodes and energy consumptions. Robust experiments have been conducted to evaluate the proposed approach. The experiment results show that Swing routing get a longer average of network lifetime 5.08%, obtains a higher average of packet delivery ratio 114.4% and reduce dead nodes 7.99% and get average remaining energy 40.88% compared to the shortest geographical routing approach as the popular routing protocol applied in the WSN environments.