Reliable routing in large scale wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have a wide range of applications including target detection and tracking, environment monitoring, industrial process monitoring, hospital monitoring, and public utility service. A sensor network consists of a large number of sensor nodes and a few sink nodes to collect data from sensor nodes. Sensor nodes and sink nodes form a large scale wireless mesh network in which packets are typically delivered between sensor nodes and sink nodes in a multi-hop manner. Reliable packet routing in wireless sensor networks is crucial, especially when network size is large. This paper presents a reliable routing protocol (RRP) to maximize the reliability of data collection and control command delivery in large scale wireless sensor networks. RRP aims to discover multiple bidirectional routes between a sensor node and a sink node. Sink node initiates route construction with an imaginary node as the destination to guarantee complete routing topology buildup. RRP achieves load balance by sending data packets via the route with lighter workload. RRP can be optimized for lightweight routing. Simulation results show that the proposed RRP routing protocol can realize 100% of packet delivery rate and outperforms existing routing protocols in terms of packet delivery rate, routing packet overhead, and end-to-end packet delay.