Improving QoS-based Routing by Limiting Interference in Lossy Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Many new routing protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks to maximize throughput, minimize delay or improve other QoS metrics in order to solve the problems of resource-constrained sensor nodes in large networks. However, many of them are based on flooding or its variants. Many routing messages are propagated unnecessarily and may cause different interference characteristics during route discovery phase and in the actual application data transmission phase. As a result, incorrect routes may be selected. Epidemic algorithms have been used to limit flooding in the field of wireless sensor networks. Directed diffusion has been commonly used in wireless sensor networks because it is designed to improve energy efficiency and scalability. However, the intrinsic flooding scheme for interest subscriptions prevents it from achieving the maximal potential of these two goals. We propose a routing protocol that uses ID-free epidemic flooding to limit interference in conjunction with metrics for increasing throughput and reducing delay. Simulation results in ns2 show that there is an optimal number of neighbors to achieve the best throughput and delay performance. For a fixed topology of a certain size, there exists an optimal percentage of neighbors that forward the flooding message to achieve the best throughput and delay performance.