Scalable Hybrid Routing in Very Large Sensor Networks

This paper presents an architectural solution to address the problem of scalable routing for data intensive applications in very large sensor networks. Due to large routing overheads, the control complexity of the existing sensor routing protocols, both node-centric and data-centric, do not scale well in very large networks with potentially thousands of sensor devices. In this paper, we develop a hybrid architectural solution off-network control processing (ONCP) that achieves scalable routing in large networks by shifting certain amount of routing functions to an "off-network" routing server. A tiered routing approach is proposed to avoid network-wide control message dissemination. Our experimental results indicate that for large sensor networks with realistic data models, the packet drop, latency, energy performance and bandwidth usage of ONCP can be significantly better than those for completely distributed routing protocols such as directed diffusion.