Implementation of Gradient Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

IETF ROLL has recently proposed gradient routing as a fundamental building block for data collection in Wireless Sensor Networks. This paper seconds this choice by presenting an implementation of gradient routing on current hardware, and by showing experimentally that gradient routing is robust against topological changes. To stress its self-healing quality, we design and implement a complete communication stack in which neighbor tables are built in a purely reactive fashion. We quantify the resulting topological changes, and show how gradient routing elegantly handles these dynamics. This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first experimental study on gradient routing as advocated by IETF ROLL.