A Load-Balanced Guiding Navigation Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the major applications of wireless sensor networks is guiding navigation service with its goal to assist moving objects in leaving a hazardous region safely and quickly. In this paper, we propose a distributed guiding navigation protocol that can guide moving objects to multiple exits with load balancing among multiple navigation paths to the exits. With the assistances of sensor nodes, moving objects are guided to different navigation paths so that they can move to exits as soon as possible without causing congestion. In some traditional navigation algorithms, a sensor may select a wrong guiding direction when an information-updating packet has not flooded through the whole network. Hence, the guiding direction of the sensor may oscillate in a short time and guided objects will confuse with this phenomenon, called direction oscillation problem. This problem will be eliminated in our proposed protocol. Simulation results indicate that our protocol can guide moving objects to exits in shorter time and solve the direction oscillation problem effectively.