Optimizing End to End Routing Performance in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The geographic routing is an ideal approach to realize pointto-point routing in wireless sensor networks because packets can be delivered by only maintaining a small set of neighbors' physical positions. The geographic routing assumes that a packet can be moved closer to the destination in the network topology if it is moved geographically closer to the destination in the physical space. This assumption, however, only holds in an ideal model where uniformly distributed nodes communicate with neighbors through wireless channels with perfect reception. Because this model oversimplifies the spatial complexity of a wireless sensor network, the geographic routing may often lead a packet to the local minimum or low quality route. Unlike the geographic forwarding, the ETX-embedding proposed in this paper can accurately encode both a network's topological structure and channel quality to small size nodes' virtual coordinates, which makes it possible for greedy forwarding to guide a packet along an optimal routing path. Our performance evaluation based on both the MICA2 sensor platform and TOSSIM simulator shows that the greedy forwarding based on ETX-embedding outperforms previous geographic routing approaches.