Random walk routing in WSNs with regular topologies

Topology is one of the most important characteristics for any type of networks because it represents the network's inherent properties and has great impact on the performance of the network. For wireless sensor networks (WSN), a well-deployed regular topology can help save more energy than what a random topology can do. WSNs with regular topologies can prolong network lifetime as studied in many previous work. However, little work has been done in developing effective routing algorithms for WSNs with regular topologies, except routing along a shortest path with the knowledge of global location information of sensor nodes. In this paper, a new routing protocol based on random walk is proposed. It does not require global location information. It also achieves load balancing property inherently for WSNs which is difficult to achieve by other routing protocols. In the scenarios where the message required to be sent to the base station is in comparatively small size with the inquiry message among neighboring nodes, it is proved that the random walk routing protocol can guarantee high probability of successful transmission from the source to the base station with the same amount of energy consumption as the shortest path routing. Since in many applications of WSNs, sensor nodes often send only beep-like small messages to the base station to report their status, our proposed random walk routing is thus a viable scheme and can work very efficiently especially in these application scenarios. The random walk routing provides load balancing in the WSN as mentioned, however, the nodes near to the base station are inevitably under heavier burden than those far away from the base station. Therefore, a density-aware deployment scheme is further proposed to guarantee that the heavy-load nodes do not affect the network lifetime even if their energy is exhausted. The main idea is deploying sensors with different densities according to their distance to the base station. It will be shown in this paper that incorporating the random walk routing protocol with the density-aware deployment scheme can effectively prolong the network lifetime.