A Routing Scheme with Localized Movement in Event-Driven Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), energy is one of the most important resources that should be economically used. But most routing approaches employed by WSNs are hop-by-hop relay schemes, which cause sensors along a routing path not only collecting its environmental data, and then sending the data to base station, but also relaying data received from its neighbors toward base station. This will result in an unbalanced energy consumption problem. In the paper, we propose a routing approach, named Routing Assistant Scheme with Localized Movement (RASLM) which deploys mobile sensors to help relay of packets for nodes along an active routing path so as to prevent them from dying much earlier than others. This scheme can also stabilize the routing path to ensure that the sensed data can be sent to the base station safely and smoothly. Experimental results show that the RASLM can effectively improve the system lifetime in event-driven wireless sensor networks.