Title: Spatial-Temporal relation-based Energy-Efficient Reliable routing protocol in wireless sensor networks

Authors: Min Chen, Taekyoung Kwon, Shiwen Mao, Victor C.M. Leung

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver V6T 1Z4, Canada. ' School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-744, Korea. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Auburn University, 200 Broun Hall, Auburn, AL 36849-5201, USA. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver V6T 1Z4, Canada

Abstract: Delivering sensory data to the sink reliably in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) calls for a scalable, energy-efficient and error-resilient routing solution. In this paper, a Spatial-Temporal relation-based Energy-Efficient Reliable (STEER) routing protocol is proposed to achieve the above goals. As opposed to the next-hop-selection-first, data-relay-next approach, which is typical in traditional routing protocols in WSNs, STEER reverses these two steps. In STEER, each data packet is relayed by broadcasting, and, among the neighbours (closer to the sink) that receive the data, one next-hop node will be elected. In so doing, eligibility as a next hop is evaluated by temporal gradient, which is similar to backoff for channel access in IEEE 802.11 systems. The value of temporal gradient is determined locally by the spatial information of each neighbour. To quantify the temporal gradient systematically, a spatial-temporal mapping function is proposed. Comprehensive simulations show that STEER performs well to provide efficient and robust routing in highly unreliable WSNs.

Keywords: energy efficiency; multipath routing; reliability; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; wireless networks; routing protocols; spatial-temporal mapping.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2009.026361

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2009 Vol.5 No.3, pp.129 - 141

Published online: 08 Jun 2009 *

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