Stochastic Routing In Large Scale Sensor Networks

Effective routing in large scale sensor networks is important in the engineering practice. A simple and robust mechanism named stochastic routing (SR) is put forward in this paper. It utilizes the relationship between the network topology and the data distribution. An approximate scale-free topology is first established based on an extended preferential attachment algorithm (EPA). The sink nodes are assumed to be the starting nodes in EPA and they have higher initial degree than others. The sensor nodes can decide their next hop simply by stochastically selecting one node from their neighbors. Higher degree nodes have more chances to be selected. The stochastic feature can also simplify the routing update process. The simulations show that most of the packets can reach the sink nodes successfully. Longer evolving time of the network can improve the reaching probability. The average length of packets´ traversing path is in proportion to the square root of the WSN network size. This feature is helpful to keep the stable transportation of packets. Furthermore, the stochastic routing is quite simple and easy to be implemented in resource constraint sensor nodes. All these achievements are helpful to deploy large scale sensor networks