ECTP: Enhanced Collection Tree Protocol for practical wireless sensor network applications

In many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, there are many practical considerations that need to be factored into the design of the underlying networking protocols. For example, the need to involve more than one sink node, i.e. more than one data destination, in the network could be one of the main requirements. This requirement stems from the need for the WSN to monitor several phenomena with potentially different interested parties for each monitored phenomenon. The synchronized operation of the WSN nodes is another important requirement in order to ensure that the actions taken as a result of a detected event are timely and accurate. Several routing protocols have been proposed for WSNs in the past. However, when these protocols are put in practical use, it was found their inability to provide the robust performance that is required for many sensitive applications. In this paper, we propose a new multi-sink routing protocol, which we call ECTP, which we target for the oil and gas industry. In such an application, the reliable synchronized data delivery to multiple destinations (sinks) is required. We perform several practical experiments using actual WSN hardware to evaluate the proposed protocol. We discuss the results of these experiments and propose future directions for this research.