taming the underlying challenges of reliable multihop routing in sensor networks
The dynamic and lossy nature of wireless communication poses major challenges to reliable, self-organizing multihop networks. These non-ideal characteristics are more problematic with the primitive, low-power radio transceivers found in sensor networks, and raise new issues that routing protocols must address. Link connectivity statistics should be captured dynamically through an efficient yet adaptive link estimator and routing decisions should exploit such connectivity statistics to achieve reliability. Link status and routing information must be maintained in a neighborhood table with constant space regardless of cell density. We study and evaluate link estimator, neighborhood table management, and reliable routing protocol techniques. We focus on a many-to-one, periodic data collection workload. We narrow the design space through evaluations on large-scale, high-level simulations to 50-node, in-depth empirical experiments. The most effective solution uses a simple time averaged EWMA estimator, frequency based table management, and cost-based routing.
challenge reliability multihop routing routing sensor networks network dynamic wireless communication self-organization routing protocol addressing linking connection statistics efficiency adapt link estimation estimates exploit informal space evaluation management data collection workload design space simulation experience effect timing large-scale neighborhood management low power cost