Low-Cost and Robust Geographic Opportunistic Routing in a Strip Topology Wireless Network

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been used for many long-term monitoring applications with the strip topology that is ubiquitous in the real-world deployment, such as pipeline monitoring, water quality monitoring, vehicle monitoring, and Great Wall monitoring. The efficiency of routing strategy has been playing a key role in serving such monitoring applications. In this article, we first present a robust geographic opportunistic routing (GOR) approach—LIght Propagation Selection (LIPS)—that can provide a short path with low energy consumption, communication overhead, and packet loss. To overcome the complication caused by the multi-turning point structure, we propose the virtual Plane mirror (VPM) algorithm, inspired by the light propagation, which is to map the strip topology into the straight one logically. We then select partial neighbors as the candidates to avoid blindly involving all next-hop neighbors and ensure the data transmission along the correct direction. Two implementation problems of VPM—transmission spread angle and the communication range—are thoroughly analyzed based on the percolation theory. Based on the preceding candidate selection algorithms, we propose a GOR algorithm in the strip topology network. By theoretical analysis and extensive simulation, we illustrate the validity and higher transmission performance of LIPS in strip WSNs. In addition, we have proved that the length of the path in LIPS is two times the length of the shortest path via geometrical analysis. Simulation results show that the transmission success rate of our approach is 26.37% higher than the state-of-the-art approach, and the communication overhead and energy consumption rate are 33.11% and 40.23% lower, respectively.