Collaborative Routing Protocol Based on Hydrodynamics for Wireless Sensor Networks

Collaborative routing protocol design is hard work for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), especially for the large scale WSNs. The complexity and collaboration associated with the routing protocol design must be taken into account. A collaborative hydrodynamics routing (HR) protocol based on hydrodynamic theory is proposed in this paper, which aims at prolonging the network lifetime and adapting to the variety of network scales. Packets for forwarding in sensor networks can be analogous to fluid elements moving in a fluid field. Sink nodes are similar to the sink flows and source nodes are similar to the source flows; and packets would flow from sources to sinks under potential flow. Simulation results show that our approach has a great advantage as it offers a significant improvement in the aspects of decreasing complexity and prolonging network lifetime and demonstrates high performance for the improvement in collaboration of routing protocol. Comparing with conventional AODV protocol, HR achieves higher successful delivery rate and longer network lifetime by 50% and 40%, respectively.