SOFROP: Self-organizing and fair routing protocol for wireless networks with mobile sensors and stationary actors

Abstract

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSAN) have become increasingly popular in recent years. The combined operation between sensor nodes and actors results in a major advantage compared to pure sensor networks extending the range of possible applications. One of the emerging applications is the Amazon scenario in which stationary actors are deployed at accessible points in a thick forest structure and sensor nodes are thrown in a river flowing through the forest to gather observations from unreachable areas. This unprecedented and unique setting exposes two important challenges: (a) the dynamics of the river forms a continuously varying topology of sensor nodes requiring a highly adaptive network organization and (b) the inherent features of sensor and actor nodes, combined with rapid changes in the link structure of the network requiring efficient bandwidth utilization and data transmission. In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing SOFROP, a self-organizing and fair routing protocol for WSANs. Through extensive simulations, we point out two highlights of SOFROP: the efficient lightweight routing that is optimized for fairness and the locally acting adaptive overlay network formation.