A Priority Based Dynamic Adaptive Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming a viable tool for many monitoring applications. In many cases these applications may be of critical nature where the transmitting of vital information from sensors to base station or sink is crucial, and data loss cannot be tolerated. As a result, the information transmission of wireless sensor networks has various different requirements in performance, such as real-time, reliability and delay. Traditional ad hoc network routing protocols are lack of a priority scheduling routing selection strategy, and are mainly based on the condition ldquoshortest pathrdquo, so after the load increase to a certain extent, a vital packet may be dropped in order to send an ordinary message. To this point, across-layer design method is used to present a new routing protocol which is named as priority based dynamic adaptive routing (PDAR), PDAR uses a priority scheduling adaptive routing mechanism to improve the reliability of sending a packet with high priority and the performance of WSNs. Simulation results show that PDAR significantly decreases end-to end delays by 40.3% and packet loss ratio by 15.3% for high-priority flows without starvation of ordinary traffic, which performs much better than dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol.