ID-Based Routing: A Grid Topology Protocol

One of the main sources of the routing overhead is the routing protocols that are based on flooding mechanisms. Such routing protocols result in low performance and high resource consumption, especially for constrained devices such as sensors, and actuators. Besides, there are many sensor-based indoor or outdoor applications that rely on deterministic nodes' controllable deployment. Mainly, these applications are used for monitoring and control, for example, home, building, and factory automation and monitoring applications; or outdoor monitoring applications, like forest, disaster, and agriculture areas. The shortcoming in the flooding routing protocols has been addressed by using location-based routing that uses GPS devices. This would decrease the routing overhead but will increase the cost of the network nodes since it need hardware support. In this paper, a solution that reduces the overhead of the flooding mechanisms without needing any hardware support is proposed. The proposed protocol is a routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) called ID-Based Routing; It uses predefined node identifications to build the routes and is designed especially for grid topology-based applications. It consumes nearly zero memory footprint because it doesn't use routing tables at all. Moreover, its communication is very low since no need to send packets to establish the routes, which consumes much energy due to radio communication to send/receive routing packets.