Message-initiated constraint-based routing for wireless ad-hoc sensor networks

Most existing routing mechanisms differ in routing objectives and routing strategies; however, all the existing routing protocols have in common that the routing objective and destination specification are fixed, and that the routing objective is incorporated only implicitly. We propose a general message specification mechanism to encode explicitly the routing destinations, constraints and objectives in messages, so that general-purpose instead of objective or destination specific routing strategies can be applied. Using general-purpose routing strategies while specifying quality-of-service (QoS) properties explicitly at the application layer in messages, QoS-aware strategies for individual messages are obtained. We also propose two frameworks of general-purpose routing strategies for this type of message specification.