Efficient delivery-guaranteed geographic routing in 3D wireless sensor networks with holes

In many applications, sensor nodes are deployed in a 3D environment with obstacles, in which case a great deal of holes exist in 3D wireless sensor networks constructed. Recently, several geographic routing protocols are proposed for 3D wireless sensor networks. Each of them, however, cannot guarantee packet delivery or demands a long routing path to turn around a hole. In this paper, we first introduce a method of constructing a guide to the navigation on the surface of a hole. Subsequently, a geographic routing protocol termed the Greedy-Guide_Navigation-Greedy protocol (GGNG) that can always route a packet to turn around a hole with the help of the guide is proposed. GGNG guarantees packet delivery and can be extended toward a mobile sensor network in a limited 3D space. Simulations show that the path stretch of each routing protocol to GGNG in approximately 90% of the cases is between 1.02 and 189.24. In addition, the number of messages transmitted by a node surrounding a hole in the guide construction is approximately three. Copyright (C) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.