DAST: A QoS-Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a challenging problem is how to advance network QoS. Energy-efficiency, network communication traffic and failure-tolerance, these important factors of QoS are closely related with the applied performance of WSNs. Hence a QoS-aware routing protocol called directed alternative spanning tree (DAST) is proposed to balance the above three factors of QoS. A directed tree-based model is constructed to bring data transmission more motivated and efficient. Based on Markov, a communication state predicted mechanism is proposed to choose reasonable parent, and packet transmission to double-parent is submitted with alternative algorithm. For enhancing network failure-tolerance, routing reconstruction is studied on. With the simulations, the proposed protocol is evaluated in comparison with the existing protocols from energy efficiency to the failure-tolerance. The performance of DAST is verified to be efficient and available, and it is competent for satisfying QoS of WSNs.