Self-Selecting Reliable Path Routing in diverse Wireless Sensor Network environments

Routing protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSN) face three major performance challenges. The first one is an efficient use of bandwidth that minimizes the transfer delay of packets between nodes to ensure the shortest end-to-end delay for packet transmission from source to destination. The second challenge is the ability to maintain data flow around permanent and transient node or link failures ensuring the maximum delivery rate of packets from source to destination. The final challenge is to efficiently use energy while maximizing delivery rate and minimizing end-to-end delay. Protocols that establish a permanent route between source and destination send packets from node to node quickly, but suffer from costly route recalculation in the event of any node or link failures. Protocols that select the next hop at each node on the traversed path suffer from a delay required to make such selection. The way in which a protocol repairs routes determines the number of packets lost by each failure and ultimately affects the energy used for communication. This paper presents a novel family of wireless sensor routing protocols, the self-selecting reliable path routing protocol family (SSRPF), that address all three of the afore-mentioned challenges.