Routing Hole Handling Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Review

A Wireless Sensor Network consists of several tiny devices which have the capability to sense and compute the environmental phenomenon. These sensor nodes are deployed in remote areas without any physical protections. A Wireless Sensor Network can have various types of anomalies due to some random deployment of nodes, obstruction and physical destructions. These anomalies can diminish the sensing and communication functionalities of the network. Many kinds of holes can be formed in a sensor network that creates geographically correlated areas. These holes are also responsible for creating communication voids. These voids do not let the packets to reach the destination and minimises the expected network performance. Hence it ought to be resolved. In this paper we presented different kinds of holes that infect the sensor network, their characteristics and the effects on successful communication within the sensor network .Later we presented a detailed review on different routing hole handing techniques available in literature ,their possible strengths and short comes. At last we also presented a qualitative comparison of these routing hole handing techniques.

Keywords:

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) , Geographic routing , greedy forwarding , sensor nodes , routing holes