Beacon-based routing optimization in data-gathering wireless sensor networks

In this paper we focus on beacon-based routing optimization of data-gathering wireless sensor networks. Such a network consists of a sink node and a number of scattered sensor nodes which send data packets back to the sink in a multihop fashion. Usually the routing messages, denoted as “beacon”, are initiated by the sink and spread out the whole network by flooding or gossiping. We believe that the mechanism of selecting upstream node as relay has great impact to the packet delivery performance. In this work several beacon rebroadcasting mechanism are inspected and the data packet delivery performance of them are compared by simulations. The simulation result shows that current Zigbee tree-based routing has great flaw in large scale networks. Based on the comparison of the results we propose an optimal link-state beacon-based routing (OLSBR) which shows that parent selection by link state can greatly improve the packet delivery performance.