PathZip: Packet path tracing in wireless sensor networks

In order to provide reliable data delivery and system management for large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs), tracing the route paths of packets in a lightweight manner is crucial and critical. Real-time path tracing technology enables us to observe every data transmission and analyze network dynamics in a fine-grained fashion. Due to resource constraints of WSNs, however, it is difficult, if not impossible, to integrate into each packet with its full path information. We attempt to capture such information with inserting a small and constant overhead into each packet. In this design, PathZip, each sensor node performs lightweight hash-based computations to passively label every packet forwarded. Meanwhile, the sink extracts the label information so as to leverage the pre-knowledge on the network to compute the full packet path. Both topology-aware and geometry-assistant techniques are utilized by PathZip in order to exploit different network knowledge and reduce the computation and storage overhead greatly. We conduct theoretical analysis and extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of our design. The results show that our method is effective to trace the full route path in large-scale WSNs, and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.