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IEEE SYSTEMS JOURNAL
On Energy-Efficient Straight-Line Routing
Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks
Hsiang-Hung Liu, Jia-Jang Su, and Cheng-Fu Chou
AbstractOne of the limitations of a wireless sensor network
(WSN) is its limited sensor node energy resource; this necessitates
an energy-efficient routing protocol that maximizes the overall sys-
tem performance. Rumor routing is a classic random-walk routing
protocol that, unfortunately, is not scalable and can result in spiral
paths. We consider that the shortest distance between two points
is a straight line and that two straight lines in a plane are likely
to intersect and develop for WSNs an improved protocol called
straight-line routing (SLR), in which we construct a straight path
using two-hop information without the assistance of geographic
information. SLR thus reduces the energy consumption of sensor
nodes in WSNs. We propose enhanced schemes to improve perfor-
mance and conserve more energy and, with extensive simulation
results, demonstrate the effectiveness of these SLR schemes in
comparison with rumor routing.
Index TermsComputer networks, protocols, routing, routing
protocols, sensor systems and applications.
I. I NTRODUCTION
A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a special network with
a large number of sensor nodes used to monitor different
types of physical or environmental conditions. As a WSN has
no infrastructure, its sensor nodes communicate via wireless
radio interfaces, which complicates data access. For this reason,
communication in sensor nets is usually achieved in a hop-by-
hop manner, based on distributed routing protocols. WSNs have
limited resources for use in gathering data. One of the inherent
limitations of a wireless sensor node is its limited energy
resources: Each WSN sensor node is battery operated, making
battery recharging or replacements difficult or even impossible.
Although mass low-cost production of sensor nodes will be fea-
sible in the near future, battery capacity only doubles every 30
years [1]. Due to such slow improvements in battery capacity,
energy constraint problems are unlikely to be resolved anytime
soon. Energy-efficient routing protocols for WSNs are crucial.
We are interested in rumor routing (RR) [2], which is a
classic routing protocol. The random-walk routing protocol
performs well when there are a small number of events, when
Manuscript received October 8, 2014; revised December 9, 2014 and
May 26, 2015; accepted June 17, 2015. This work was supported in part by the
Ministry of Science and Technology of China under Contract MOST 102-2221-
E-002-096-MY3 and 103-2218-E-002 -023-. (Corresponding author: Cheng-
Fu Chou.)
H.-H. Liu is with the Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia,
National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan (e-mail: jimmychad@
cmlab.csie.ntu.edu.tw).
J.-J. Su and C.-F. Chou are with the Department of Computer Science and
Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan
(e-mail: ccf@csie.ntu.edu.tw).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSYST.2015.2448714
1932-8184 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
1
nodes can sleep most of time, and when average power con-
sumption is low, resulting in long battery life. In RR, to prevent
choosing backward nodes, after choosing the next hop, the
current node appends all of the neighbor IDs to the packet pay-
load; thereafter, the protocol does not choose from these IDs.
We hence expect routing packet sizes to grow with time
and transmission energy costs to increase accordingly. RR is
not scalable, because wireless channels have lower bandwidth
than wired networks; RR increases the bandwidth needed for
transmission because it transmits the appended IDs for every
hop. Moreover, it does not actually prevent the construction
of curved paths. It means that there may be much meandering
along the path, leading to much wasted energy; the worst case
here is the spiral path. Furthermore, curved paths consist of
more nodes than straight paths, leading to a correspondingly
longer routing response time and a greater amount of battery
consumption. Our goal is to design an energy-efficient routing
protocol to improve on the RR protocol.
We propose straight-line routing (SLR), which is a novel
random-walk routing protocol. Our idea is simple to implement
and highly efficient. We jointly consider low energy consump-
tion and a high probability of successful path discovery. First,
we solve the spiral problem in the RR protocol by keeping
the event and query paths as straight as possible. The fact
that two nonparallel lines intersect on a plane ensures the
successful construction of the routing path; indeed, as we will
show below, Monte Carlo simulations verify the effectiveness
of our approach in this respect. SLR records only two hops of
information and does not append the neighbor IDs to the packet
payload after choosing the next hop. This is in contrast to RR,
which wastes energy with meandering paths and records the
visited nodes in the packet payload. Although RR thus avoids
choosing visited nodes, it does not actually result in improved
searching directions. As previously mentioned, similar to RR,
SLR performs well when the number of events is small. This
makes sense in a WSN environment, since area monitoring
typically entails only a few data requests (emergency events)
from nodes. Furthermore, we improve on the baseline SLR by
considering more initial directions; if the initial direction leads
away from the destination, we note that the reverse direction
may be a good choice. Finally, if we must transmit more packets
using the same routing path, we can refine the path based on the
information gained after the path is successfully constructed.
This path refinement is an attempt to decrease the number of
hops and reduce response times. Thus, we expect that SLR,
which is a random-walk type of protocol, is scalable and more
energy efficient.
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2 IEEE SYSTEMS JOURNAL
The main contributions of SLR are as follows.
1) In our previous work [3], we take advantage of the fact
that two straight lines in a plane are likely to intersect.
Our key idea is to keep the event and query paths straight.
The concept behind SLR involves defining inside and
outside bands. Each node stores in its memory only the
most suitable node for the next step, without any global
information. SLR fixes the spiral-like routing problem,
instead of randomly searching for the next node.
2) In this paper, we propose several improvements that
increase the successful path discovery ratio and minimize
hop counts. We proposed dual way(/2) to increase
the successful path discovery ratio by considering more
initial directions. After the path has been constructed,
we minimize hop counts in the SLR refinement phase in
an attempt to find a better path from the source to the
destination.
3) Most crucially, we have demonstrated the advantages of
SLR and have used performance studies to show that
SLR outperforms RR and achieves higher successful path
discovery ratios and lower hop counts and saves more
energy in WSNs.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: We
introduce the background and related work in Section II and
then describe the key idea and overview of the SLR algorithm
in Section III. In Section IV, we present in detail the baseline
SLR, and in Section V, we describe enhanced SLR schemes that
improve energy efficiency. We present the experimental results
in Section VI and conclude in Section VII.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Routing protocols in sensor networks may be divided into
two categories. In the global addressing category, traditional
distributed routing protocols such as destination-sequenced
distance vector routing [4], ad hoc on-demand distance vector
routing [5], and dynamic source routing [6] are not appropriate
for a sensor network. This is because broadcasting schemes
are included in the protocols to collect information on the
entire network. Since broadcasts are costly operations, frequent
broadcasts drain the sensor battery quickly.
Geographic routing has recently attracted a great deal of
attention from the sensor/ad hoc network community. When
each node is equipped with a Global Positioning System (GPS)
device, geographical routing uses a nodes location to discover
a path to that node [7], [8]. Sensor nodes with GPS modules
consume energy when turned on. Although the new generation
of GPS modules (with an integrated GPS receiver and antenna)
are more energy efficient, when compared with sensor nodes
without GPS modules, GPS-equipped nodes still consume more
energy, quickly draining sensor node batteries. Moreover, even
if we are able to control the GPS duty cycle, GPS cold startup
times are lengthy. In addition, regardless of the aforementioned
issues, geographic routing performance may be far from opti-
mal for general sensor fields [9].
The other routing protocol category is composed of random-
walk schemes. Gossip [10] and RR [2] are two well-known
examples. They are probabilistic in nature: A node chooses a
partner set from its neighbors at random without GPS infor-
mation. Random-walk schemes simultaneously build the query
and event paths. In the beginning, one node initializes the
routing, and the search path consists of this node only. Then,
one of its neighbor nodes is chosen as the next hop and is
added to the path. Following this, the new hop is chosen from
the neighbors of the node that was most recently added to
the path. This operation of choosing and adding the next hop
continues until the path is successfully constructed. The routing
path is found when the two paths intersect. As with other
random-walk schemes, this protocol is well suited to sensor
networks that generate few events, as networks with many
events would quickly drain the node batteries. If a node has
a routing message to send, it transfers this message only to its
partners. The difference between the random-walk schemes is
when choosing which node to forward packages to, RR chooses
only from its neighbors. Gossip routing, on the other hand, has
not been specifically designed for energy-constrained contexts
and has not been used in large-scale network topologies. It does
not take into account wireless environment features because
broadcasting is a costly operation.
Many routing protocols have been specifically designed to
improve on the classic RR protocol. DRR [11], IDRR [12],
SDRR [13], and ZRR [14] all attempt to solve the spiral
problem. DRR, IDRR, and SDRR use location information
to straighten the path, reducing path meandering. In [15] the
problem is considered with mobile nodes and static sink. The
idea is similar to ZRR in that the network is partitioned into
different zones, where each sensor node is a member of exactly
one zone, and the agent or query randomly selects a neighbor
in an unvisited neighboring zone. As previously mentioned, this
increases the cost of implementation, as such geographic infor-
mation depends on GPS units, which use significant amounts
of energy; thus, for networks with few events, GPS-equipped
nodes are inefficient. In SLR, we jointly consider the spiral
problem and the storage capacity of a sensor node.
III. SLR P ROTOCOL
Similar to RR, SLR constructs the path in a hop-by-hop
manner. One of the main disadvantages of RR is that it cannot
guarantee a straight path; there may be much meandering along
the path. Recalling that the shortest distance between two points
is a straight line, we take advantage of the fact that two straight
lines in a plane are likely to intersect. Thus, the key idea of the
SLR protocol is to keep the event and query paths straight. In
each step, we choose as the next hop a node that lies on the
extended line of the path. Moreover, rather than recording all
of the visited nodes in the packet payload, we record only two
hops of information. This simplifies implementation in WSNs.
A. Preliminary
Here, we first lay out some basic assumptions about sensor
nets. Sensor nets comprise nodes that are spread out randomly
or in some pattern over some well-defined area. Nodes not
only are equipped with short-range communication but also are
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LIU et al.: ENERGY-EFFICIENT STRAIGHT-LINE ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
Fig. 1. SLR overview. (a) SLR key idea. (b) SLR node positions. (c) Baseline SLR concept.
within the radio range of several other nodes. The communica-
tion power of all the nodes in a sensor net is equal. Energy is a
scarce resource for sensor nodes, and using a nodes wireless
communication requires energy. We note that target signal
amplitude attenuates as a monotonically decreasing function
of the distance from the source, according to an inverse dis-
tance squared law, or exponentially. When a node successfully
receives a packet, it knows which node sent the packet and is
able to measure the signal strength. After receiving a packet,
each node is able to determine the distance from the source
according to the signal strength. In trigonometry, the law of
cosines relates the lengths of the sides of a triangle to the cosine
of one of its angles. Therefore, each node is able to determine
the cosine value between other two nodes.
We propose a method of routing queries to nodes that have
observed a particular event. When a sensor node detects an
interesting event, it invokes the routing mechanism for the
event path. This routing path for the event grows in a straight
line until it hits the border or until the path length is equal
to some constant. That is, a fixed-length path is constructed,
and all nodes along this path record which event this path is
being constructed for, as there may be more than one event
occurring at a given time within the network. Elsewhere in
the network, there is a special node that requests events on the
sensor network: We refer to this node as the sink. When the sink
queries an event, it also executes the routing mechanism. A
query path is constructed using the same routing scheme. When
the query path intersects the corresponding event path, the
routing path is completed. The intersection node, which is
called the anchor node, replies with an ACK message to the sink
when the path has been created. For applications where there
are both events and queries, the source host constructs the event
path, and the sink host constructs the query path, and the routing
path is found when the query and event paths first intersect.
B. SLR Overview
1) We proceed without any geographic information. The
key ideapresented in the following sectioninvolves
defining inside and outside circles.
2) To minimize hop counts, we keep event and query paths
as straight as possible. The problem is how to make the
path straight. The key idea is to find the angle by radio
3
signals. To accomplish this, we consider the width of the
inside and outside circles to be the inside and outside
bands. This can be simplified by a bit representation.
3) After constructing the two straight pathsthe event and
query pathsthey should intersect. We propose a dual
way method to increase the likelihood that they do indeed
intersect.
4) Above all, the routing path from the query node to the
event node should be straight. When the routing path, that
is, the straight event path and the straight query path, is
completed, the combined routing path may not be straight
enough. Therefore, we propose an SLR refinement to
solve this problem and attempt to find a better path from
the source to the destination.
Our baseline algorithm attempts to find the next straight hop
and continue the path in the correct direction. When we find
the anchor node, we take advantage of the ACK message to
reduce path hop counts: We describe this as SLR short-cut
ACK. In sparse networks, the SLR baseline may not be able
to pick the best next straight hop. To continue constructing the
path, we must pick the proper node for the next step from a
noncandidate region: this we term a big jump. Because SLR
chooses the next node from the defined candidate region, we
enlarge the defined candidate region to increase the number
of candidate nodes when the density is low. The challenge is
how wide to enlarge the candidate region and still ensure that
SLR does not pick a backward node. We describe this in detail
in the following subsection. In addition, we propose several
improvements to increase the successful path discovery ratio
and minimize hop counts. We propose an SLR dual way method
to increase the successful path discovery ratio by considering
more initial directions, and after the path has been constructed,
we minimize hop counts by reconstructing the path based on
the constructed path information.
C. SLR Key Idea
Fig. 1(a) illustrates the basic idea. Suppose node A in
Fig. 1(a) is the current hop, node B is the prehop of node A (the
direction of the path is from B to A), and the distance between
them is R/2, where R is the radio distance. We focus on the in-
tersection of A and Bs radio ranges in a special coordinate sys-
tem, in which the first dimension is the distance from node A,
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4 IEEE SYSTEMS JOURNAL
and the second dimension is the distance from node B. Here,
the node at location (R/2, R) is most suited to be the next
hop. It is easy to construct the new coordinate system this
way. Based on our network assumption, when a node hears a
routing message for the first time, the distance from the source
can be calculated via the energy model; this value is set as the
first dimension. Thereafter, if the node hears the same message
again, the second dimension is set in the same way. The node
that locates itself at (R/2, R) sets itself as the next hop.
IV. BASELINE SLR
In practice, there is not always a node at (R/2, R). Hence,
we must ensure that we have a candidate for the next hop.
Unlike RR, our approach is unlikely to yield paths that
loop back on themselves, at least on a hop-by-hop basis [see
Fig. 1(b)].
The first coordinate (the x-coordinate) of a node is the
distance from the current hop node to itself, i.e., AC = . The
second coordinate (the y-coordinate) of a node is the distance
from the previous hop node to itself, i.e., BC = . Because
SLR does not proceed backward during path
 construction, the
value
 of is greater than or equal to 2 + 2 . That is,
2 + 2 R, and < . The node locating itself in the
position C1 is the best choice for the next hop. If there are no
other nodes in the dark-gray region, C2 or C3 is our worst-case
node candidate. Note that C2 and C3 have the same coordinates
and, thus, thesame priority level. Nodes in the dark-gray region
satisfy 2 + 2 ; SLR chooses from these to ensure that
the path keeps going forward and that a backward candidate is
not chosen as the next hop.
We define the following regions associated with a node: the
outside band and the inside band of node n, with radii of R and
R/2, respectively. We observe that the intersection of the inside
band of the current hop and the outside band of the previous hop
yields a proper set of nodes from which to choose the next hop.
We designate this intersection region as the candidate region
from which the node for the next hop is chosen.
There are two steps to the random-walk SLR routing pro-
tocol. The first is to determine the candidate region, and the
second is to choose as the next hop a node from the candidate
region. First, based on the widths of the parents inside band
and the grandparents outside band, SLR locates the candidate
region as the intersection of the two bands and determines
whether a node is in the candidate region. Second, the next-
hop node is chosen from those in the candidate region. Thus,
the procedures not only minimize the communication energy
expended in locating the next-hop node but also select the node
that yields the straightest path.
In the basic SLR approach, for each routing, every node
maintains the two variables Flagin and Flagout . Given our
assumptions, after a node receives a route request, it is able to
measure the signal strength. Via the energy-distance model, a
node can calculate the distance between the signal sender and
itself and, this way, can recognize the band of the sender. If it
is within the inside band, the node enables its Flagin , and if it
is within the outside band, it enables its Flagout . A node will
seek to be the next hop only when its Flagin and Flagout have
Fig. 2. SLR baseline forwarding.
both been enabled. Subsequently, every node in the candidate
region sets its own timer Twait . The formula to count the value
of Twait should be relative to the distance from the current
node to the parent and the distance from the current node to
the grandparent. In Fig. 1(c), we assume that the distance from
every node in the candidate region to its parent (AC i ) is nearly
the same, and seek node Ci such that
2 2 2
AB + AC i BC i
arg min =
Ci 2AB AC i
which implies arg maxCi BC i . Thus, we set the formula as
Twait = 1/distgrandparent . The value of distgrandparent is BC i
in Fig. 1(c). Note that because 0 < AB, AC < R/2, and there-
fore, BC is less than R. Thus, both B and C are within their
transmission range. If there is more than one maximum value of
BC i , we take into account residential energy (RE) and choose
that node with the biggest RE.
This formula implies the following.
1) The node in the candidate region that is farthest from
the grandparent has the shortest timer and, thus, is the
most likely to become the next-hop node. When its timer
expires, the node issues a message to notify its neighbors.
2) Apart from the node that has become the next-hop node,
other nodes in the candidate region overhear the notifica-
tion, after which they cease the contention procedure.
3) This method does not choose backward candidates as the
next hop.
As shown in Fig. 1(c), the candidate region (in black) is the
intersection of the inside band of the current node A (in light
gray) and the outside band of the parent node B (in dark gray).
Candidate region nodes (C1 , C2 , and C3 ) choose from among
themselves the next-hop node via the contention mechanism.
In Fig. 1(c), we observe that node C1 is the farthest node from
node B and has the largest angle BACi and, therefore, will
become the next-hop node.
In Fig. 2, every node maintains pair (, ), where is Flagin
and is Flagout . In the beginning, source node S broadcasts
a route request (RREQ) packet only within its transmission
range. Then, the nodes in the inside band (A, B, C, and D)
set their Flagin to 1, and the nodes in the outside band (E, F ,
G, H, I, J, K, and L) set their Flagout to 1. S then chooses a
node randomly (A here) as the next hop, so the initial direction
is from S to A.
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LIU et al.: ENERGY-EFFICIENT STRAIGHT-LINE ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
Fig. 3. SLR short-cut ACK.
Fig. 4. SLR big jump.
1) SLR Short-Cut ACK: The source constructs the event
path, and the sink constructs the query path. When the two
paths cross, SLR reaches the anchor node or the sink node,
and a route reply (RREP) ACK message is generated by the
anchor or the sink node to be sent to the source and the sink.
Interestingly, the ACK message propagates across at least two
hops, as illustrated in Fig. 3. In the baseline SLR, the distance of
each hop is, at most, R/2. When SLR forwards the RREQ hop
by hop, we take advantage of ACK messages to reduce the hop
counts of the path that has been constructed. When the path is
constructed, the anchor initially sends a RREP to A at the same
time B is receiving the RREP. Thus, as shown in Fig. 3, there
are three nodes receiving the message: A, B, and the anchor. In
practice, a node retransfers the ACK after receiving it, and the
response time and path length (hop counts) are shorter than the
original ones. Because the distance between the anchor node
and A is shorter than R/2 and the distance between B and A is
also shorter than R/2, the distance between B and the anchor
is shorter than R.
We refer to this as SLR short-cut ACK.
2) SLR Big Jump: Intuitively, the probability of an empty
candidate region is inversely proportional to the size of the
candidate region. In sparse networks, there may be few nodes
in the candidate region. To increase the probability of path
discovery, we consider nodes that lie on the extended line of
the path but not in the original candidate region.
In Fig. 4, when the search range is about R/2, there exist
no candidates for the next-hop node (that is, no nodes appear
in the candidate region). By expanding the search range to
2R/3, we likewise expand the candidate region area and, thus,
increase the probability of path discovery. We call this the
5
SLR big jump because of the lengthened radius of the inside
band, which, in the baseline SLR, was originally R/2. The
new candidate region (dark gray, Fig. 4) illustrates the concept
of the SLR big jump. Observe that there are no nodes in the
intersection of the inside and outside bands: When there are
thus no nodes in the candidate region, SLR terminates and fails
to construct the path. Consider node C1 in the area between
the outside band and the lengthened inside band. Clearly, the
distance from C1 to its grandparent B is longer than that
of any node within Bs transmission range. A longer hop
like this can reduce the number of hops and reduce energy
consumption. Consider the worst case, i.e., the smallest value of
the included angle, for which we show the lower bound. In this
case, we know that AB = R/2, AC i = 2R/3, and BC i = R.
The included BACi is
 2R 2  R 2
+ R2 2
cos = 3 2
(1)
2 2 2
3R R 3
which implies
2
. (2)
3
The deviation is, at most, /3. The path continues without
curving in on itself.
However, the prerequisite for the SLR big jump is that each
node must be able to detect whether the candidate region
is empty. For this reason, when a node transfers a routing
message, it sets a timer and waits. When the timer expires, the
node issues an SLR-BigJump notification, which includes the
newly lengthened inside band radius. Upon reception of this
notification, we expect additional neighbors to set their Flagin
to 1. However, unlike the baseline SLR, the nodes whose pair
(Flagin , Flagout ) is equal to (1, 0), instead of (1, 1), will enter
contention to become the next hop. When a node receives an
SLR-Bigjump notification from the next hop before the time
has expired, it verifies that the candidate region is not empty.
This is how we detect empty candidate regions.
Based on the discussion above, we consider a low-density
network environment. Candidate regions may often contain no
nodes, in which case SLR will be unable to find the next hop.
Thus, SLR will often terminate early in low-density networks.
To increase the probability of path discovery, we show
by how much width we must enlarge the inside and outside
bands to expand its candidate region. There are several ways
to improve on the baseline SLR. First, if the initial direction
points away from the destination, the path leads away from the
destination because SLR makes straight paths. We improve on
the baseline SLR with SLR dual way, in which we consider
more initial directions. Second, upon successful construction
of the path, we refine the path based on the constructed path
information to decrease the number of hops and reduce the
SLR response time. These enhancements are introduced in the
following subsection.
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6 IEEE SYSTEMS JOURNAL
Fig. 5. SLR inside and outside band widths.
A. Adjusting Widths of the Inside and Outside Bands
The size of the candidate region is directly related to the
width of the inside and outside bands. This width also affects
the included angle of the path at every hop. In low-density net-
works, another way to increase the probability of path discovery
is to enlarge the width of the inside and outside bands to enlarge
the candidate region. We describe here how we loosen the inside
and outside band constraints.
In Fig. 5, for example, we observe that decreasing gbout or
gbin (the outside and inside band widths) shrinks the candidate
region and increases the included angle of the path. Increasing
the included angle makes the path straighter but raises the
probability of termination. By contrast, enlarging the candidate
region shrinks the included angle but raises the probability of
successful path discovery. Therefore, our task at hand is to
determine the values of gbout and gbin . It is clear that the inside
band width is bounded by the radius of the transmission range,
that is, 0 gbin R. Recall that the radius of the candidate
region is shorter than the nodes transmission radius. As shown
in Fig. 5, the following constraints prevent searching in the
backward direction:
 if the successful path discovery ratio of SLR in low-density
gb
out
< R2
(3)
2 R < (R gbout ) < R
2
which imply
2
0 < gbout < R R 0.3R.
2 Assuming that the source node is S and that the source
In this paper, we set the inside band to the entire circle (i.e.,
with radius gbin = R), and not just a band, and the size of the
candidate region depends only on the value of gbout .
V. I MPROVEMENTS TO SLR
There still exist some challenges in SLR baseline: (a) how
to enhance the probability of successful path discovery (partic-
ularly for the low density or short transmission range cases)
and (b) how to improve the path quality, i.e., reducing the
average routing path hop count as much as possible. Moreover,
the focus of this section is to design a better SLR to cope
Fig. 6. SLR dual way() and SLR dual way(/2).
with the above issues such that we could prolong the network
lifetime effectively. In other words, a better SLR requires higher
path discover ratio and lower routing path hop count; in this
section, we enhance the probability of successful path discovery
and complete the SLR scheme by SRL dual way and SLR
refinement.
A. SLR Dual Way
In baseline SLR, the initial direction of the path is randomly
chosen by the source. It is clear that if the initial direction leads
away from the destination, the path will only get farther and
farther away from the destination, because SLR makes straight
paths. However, it is worth noting that the reverse direction is a
good choice in this case. Based on this observation, we develop
another improvement on SLR, which we term SLR dual way. It
is illustrated in Fig. 6.
In Fig. 6 (left), after A rebroadcasts this RREQ, the nodes
in the inside band of A (E, F , and G) set their Flagin to 1. At
the same time, C, in the outside band of A, sets its Flagout to 1.
That means a path has started with an initial direction from A to
C. Hereafter, the dual paths grow in their respective directions.
Clearly, increasing the number of paths increases both the
successful path discovery ratio and energy consumption. Even
networks is higher than RR, there is still room for improvement.
We propose SLR dual way(/2) to increase its success rate of
path discovery. When SLR dual way() fails to find the anchor
node, we apply SLR dual way(/2), which starts in directions
perpendicular to that of SLR dual way(). This is shown in
(4) Fig. 6 (right).
chooses a node randomly (for instance, A) as the next hop in
baseline SLR, the neighbors of the source node are Ni . We seek
node Nt such that
 
 SN 2 + SA2 AN 2 
 i i 
Nk = arg min   (5)
Ni  2SN i SA 
Nt = arg max RENk . (6)
Nk
The directions are from the source to Nt and from Nt to S; the
dual paths grow in their respective directions.
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LIU et al.: ENERGY-EFFICIENT STRAIGHT-LINE ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
Fig. 7. SLR refinement.
B. SLR Refinement
To reduce the average routing path hop count, we propose
the SLR refinement to straighten the routing path. We make the
SLR scheme able to choose a better query path and event path
such that the path between the event node and the query node
becomes more straight.
In Fig. 7, S is the source node, and D is the sink node. Sup-
pose that R is the anchor node. The initial direction of the event
path is from node S to node A, and P and Q are the previous
and next hops of R. First, when we find the anchor node in the
first round (from SLR baseline), the anchor node computes the
cosine value of . Then, based on the number of hops from
the anchor to the source (the distance from R to S) and the
number of hops from the anchor to the destination (the distance
from R to D), the anchor node computes the cosine value of
and appends the cosine value of with an ACK message back
to the source (node S). From PRQ in Fig. 7, we see that the
distance of each hop is, at most, R/2. Therefore, the distance
from node P to node Q is less than R. We focus on RDS
2 2 2
SR + SD DR
cos =
2SR SD
SR DR cos
= .
SR2 + DR2 2SR DR cos
Furthermore, based on the SLR-Refinement message and the
value of the received cos , the source node computes the cosine
between the node of the first hop in SLR baseline and each
node of its other neighbor nodes. Finally, the source node finds
a neighboring node Nt closest to cos as the second rounds
initial direction. That is
Nt = arg min | cos cos i |
Ni
where i is the included angle ASNi . Suppose source node
S chooses a node randomly (for instance, A) as the next hop
in baseline SLR: The neighbors of S are Ni . Thus, the initial
direction of the second rounds path is from S to Ni ; in Fig. 7,
this would be from S to B. To preserve the sink sides battery
power from running out too quickly, we adjust only the event
path (that is, from the source side) instead of the query path
(from the sink side).
7
In R2 , according to the triangle inequality in mathematics,
SD < SR + RD (from SRD). It means the path constructed
by SLR refinement (SD) is shorter than the path constructed
by SLR baseline (SR + RD). The sensors being deployed
randomly in the sensor field (in the discrete domain), we might
not choose a node that the initial direction is from S to D.
Without loss of generality, we assume that there exists an initial
direction from S to Nt that is the nearest direction (close to
the cosine value of ) to optimal. In R2 , if the extended line of
SNt intersects at node C, we get SR + RD > SC + CD. In
SRC, if SR + RC > SC, SR + RC + RD > SC + RD.
Since RD = RC + CD, SR + RC + RD > SC + (RC +
CD). It implies SR + RD > SC + CD. This also implies that
the path constructed by SLR refinement (SC + CD) is shorter
than the path constructed by SLR baseline (SR + RD).
VI. P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION
In this paper, we have simulated the performance of SLR for
a WSN using NS2 [16]. The sensor network was uniformly
deployed at random in a 500 500 m2 square field with 500
sensors, each with R units of transmission radius. A simple
radial propagation model was used, where each node could
reliably send packets to any node within its communication
range R, modeled as uniform disk graphs.
By default, gbin values on both paths were R, and the gbout
values of the source and the sink were 0.3R. We set the hop
limit for the event path and the query path to 50 and 10
hop counts, respectively. In baseline SLR, the searching was
initiated at R/2. When the candidate region of the current node
was empty, we expanded the searching range to 2R/3. We
evaluated the SLR performance as functions of R to represent
the network density [17].
To model network density and to facilitate comparisons of
SLR with RR, we set the reasonable transmission range from
50 to 140 m. We randomly created 100 topologies. There were
100 eventquery pairs for every topology. A total of 10 000
sourcedestination pairs were randomly chosen, and we ran
each test 30 times, from which we calculated the average
success rate, energy consumption, and hop counts. Four per-
formance metrics were used: successful path discovery ratio,
energy cost, hop stretch, and network lifetime.
A. Successful Path Discovery Ratio
First, we show in Fig. 8(a) the successful path discovery ratio
achieved by ideal, RR, baseline SLR, SLR dual way(), and
SLR dual way(/2) for N = 500. If SLR dual way(/2) was
(7) able to find an initial direction with which to construct a suc-
cessful path in any of the 30 tests for a given sourcedestination
pair, we marked this pair as a success case. Hence, we calculate
the ideal success rate as the number of success pairs divided by
10 000 and use this to plot the ideal success rate curve. When
the transmission range is less than 70 units, the successful path
discovery ratios of baseline are with weak performance. How-
ever, the new proposed dual way(/2) schemes outperform RR
up to 13% relative improvement (average is 9.27%). Note that
for low-density networks (transmission range of 50), all the
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.

8 IEEE SYSTEMS JOURNAL

Fig. 8. End-to-end path construction. (a) Successful path discovery ratio. (b) Average hop counts. (c) Hop stretch.

Fig. 9. Energy efficiency. (a) Energy cost per path construction. (b) Energy consumption in transmissions (including path construction) for R = 50. (c) Network
lifetime.

ratios were below 50%. This is not considered good perfor-
mance because there may be many unreachable cases. Monte
Carlo simulations show the probability of two lines intersecting
in a bounded rectangular region to be approximately 69% [2].
This means that the event path has a 69% chance of intersecting
with a query path in baseline SLR. In SLR dual way() and
dual way(/2), there is a 97% and 99.71% successful path
recovery ratio, respectively. The probability of two straight
lines intersecting in a rectangle is greater than the simulation
results, because our nodes are uniformly deployed at random
in the WSNs and because the paths are not entirely straight.
In dense networks, the probability is very close to that of a
continuous environment.
B. Hop Stretch
We compared the average hop counts of the paths of five
schemes: optimal, RR, baseline SLR, SLR dual way, and SLR
refinement. It should be noted that we only compare success-
fully constructed paths. The results, in Fig. 8(b), demonstrate
the benefit of the SLR short-cut ACK in these four SLR
schemes. SLR refinement yielded performance closest to the
optimal and outperformed the baseline scheme by up to 25%
relative improvement (average is 17.27%). As expected, SLR
refinement also resulted in the smallest hop counts, because
the event and query paths were both straight; conversely, RRs
extensive meanderings led to the longest paths.
The hop stretch is the ratio of the average hop counts to the
shortest path hop counts between the source and the sink node.
Fig. 8(c) shows the average hop stretch of the four schemes for
transmission ranges between 50 and 140. As expected, the SLR
path refinement protocol outperforms all other schemes in all
cases. Compared with RR, the average hop stretch is improved
from 5% to 50%. Baseline SLR and SLR dual way perform
the second best but with only a slight difference. These results
demonstrate the significant advantages of SLR schemes over
RR, particularly SLR refinement.
C. Energy Consumption
Energy consumption is important for sensors with non-
rechargeable batteries. The most straightforward formulation
is to look at the total energy required to transport a packet
over a multihop path from the source to the sink. Fig. 9(a) and
(b) shows the energy consumption of path construction and the
number of transmissions after construction, respectively.
For dense networks, not only is the success ratio of SLR
higher than that of RR but more energy is also saved using SLR.
This is because RR only avoids extending the path in a backward
direction and does not actually correct the direction. This leads
to excessive path meandering and increases RR hop counts.
For transmission ranges below 80, as shown in Fig. 9(a),
baseline SLR, SLR dual way, and SLR refinement all consume
more energy. Therefore, we are interested in the energy cost
with low-density networks. After path construction, we observe
the costs of each transmission. Fig. 9(b) shows the results when
each sensor has a transmission range of 50. The x-axis repre-
sents the transmission time, that is, n, after path construction,
and the y-axis represents the energy consumption including
path construction for different numbers of transmissions. Be-
cause the hop counts for all SLR schemes are less than those for
RR, the total energy costs with a transmission range of 50 can
be reduced by more than a factor of 2 for RR (SLR refinement
versus RR). This also shows that all SLR schemes reduce
energy consumption, and that for transmission ranges greater
than 50, the heavier the traffic load, the more energy is saved.
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
LIU et al.: ENERGY-EFFICIENT STRAIGHT-LINE ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
Fig. 9(c) shows the network lifetimes for RR, baseline SLR,
and SLR improvement (SLR dual way(), SLR dual way(/2),
and SLR refinement). The network lifetime is defined as the
amount of data transferred from the source nodes to the sink
nodes before any node in the network runs out of power. Every
event detected by the sensor node transmits data to the sink
30 times. Every transmission is composed of 30 units of data.
We set the initial energy to 10 000 units in every battery-powered
node in the network. The sensor nodes consume 90 and 100 units
when receiving and sending the data to neighbor nodes, re-
spectively, and consume two units with every computation. The
results show that the network lifetimes for our protocols are
longer than those for RR due to the lower energy consumption
for path construction, and the hop stretches are shorter than
those of RR as well. Therefore, the RR protocol consumes more
energy in transmitting data from the source to the sink. The
above observations lead us to conclude that the SLR refinement
schemes perform better than baseline SLR and that in this net-
work case, the RR protocol is outperformed by baseline SLR.
VII. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we have proposed a novel protocol called SLR
and developed schemes to construct straight paths without local
information for WSNs. SLR builds both the query path and the
event path without any need for geographic information, taking
advantage of the fact that two nonparallel lines intersect on a
plane. Both RR and SLR paths are created on such a basis.
Optimal routing in energy-constrained networks is not practi-
cally feasible because it requires future knowledge. Keeping
the path straight provides a natural way to address the energy
cost problem of existing geographic routing protocols. We have
demonstrated the advantages of SLR and have used simulation
results to show that SLR outperforms RR and achieves higher
successful path discovery ratios and lower hop stretch and saves
more energy in WSNs.
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Hsiang-Hung Liu received the B.S. degree from the
Department of Applied Mathematics, National Uni-
versity of Kaohsiung, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, in 2006
and the M.S. degree from the Institute of Informa-
tion Systems and Applications, National Tsing Hua
University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2009. He is currently
working toward the Ph.D. degree in the Graduate
Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National
Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
His current research interests include wireless
sensor networks, distributed multimedia systems,
and computer graphics.
Jia-Jang Su received the M.S. degree in computer
science and information engineering from National
Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Cheng-Fu Chou received the M.S. and Ph.D. de-
grees from the University of Maryland, College Park,
MD, USA, in 1999 and 2002, respectively.
After his graduation, he joined the Department
of Computer Science and Information Engineering,
National Taiwan University, where he is currently a
Professor. Since 2002, he has been a Visiting Scholar
with the Department of Computer Science, Univer-
sity of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA,
in 2002. His current research interests include dis-
tributed multimedia systems, software-defined net-
working, wireless networks, and their performance evaluation.