Due to the lack of dependency on beacon messages for location exchange, the beaconless geographic routing protocol has attracted considerable attention from the research community. However, existing beaconless geographic routing protocols are likely to generate duplicated data packets when multiple winners in the greedy area are selected. Furthermore, these protocols are designed for a uniform sensor field, so they cannot be directly applied to practical irregular sensor fields with partial voids. To prevent the failure of finding a forwarding node and to remove unnecessary duplication, in this paper, we propose a region-based collision avoidance beaconless geographic routing protocol to increase forwarding opportunities for randomly-deployed sensor networks. By employing different contention priorities into the mutually-communicable nodes and the rest of the nodes in the greedy area, every neighbor node in the greedy area can be used for data forwarding without any packet duplication. Moreover, simulation results are given to demonstrate the increased packet delivery ratio and shorten end-to-end delay, rather than well-referred comparative protocols.
Keywords: beaconless geographic routing protocol; region-based collision avoidance; wireless sensor networks.