Abstract
Wireless sensor networks have been widely used in many different applications and in the future they will play an increasingly important role. Since these networks have no fixed infrastructure and are usually distributed over large areas, the use of routing protocols is indispensable. However, when the number of nodes within an area increases, the communication interferences and collisions increase significantly, thus reducing the network performance. In this paper, we first introduce a new measurable quantity, the "node concentration", in contrast to the standard network density. Then, the performance of the AODV (Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector) routing protocol is evaluated with respect to the variation in node concentration. Finally, we propose an enhancement of AODV, called CG-AODV, by introducing a "node concentration-driven gossiping" approach for limiting the flooding of control packets. The simulation results demonstrate that CG-AODV provides significant improvements in terms of packet delivery ratio and path discovery delay. © 2013 IEEE.