Traffic Based Dynamic Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

Numerous routing protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks, each of which is highly optimized for a certain class of traffic, like real time, reliable sense and disseminate, network reprogramming, energy efficiency and so on. However, a typical deployment demands an arbitrary communication pattern that generates multiple traffic types simultaneously. Arguably, no single routing protocol can completely cater to a deployment´s various flavors. In this paper, we propose a dynamic routing framework that can replace the traditional routing layer with a collection of routing decisions. We allow application packets to carry a two-bit preamble that uniquely describes the nature of communication sought for. The framework dynamically wires the appropriate routing component from a set of well-defined suite. We conduct extensive simulation experiments that generates a concurrent mix of different traffic types - each having its own, and often conflicting, communication demands. For such an application, we show that we could meet each traffic types demands for reliability, delay, path distribution, link losses and congestion losses. We also show that service differentiation can indeed be met successfully, and practical deployments can be an imminent reality.