Chaotic Routing: A Set-based Broadcasting Routing Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Data communication in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) exhibits distinctive characteristics. Routing in WSNs still relies on simple variations of traditional distance vector or link state based protocols, thus suffering low throughput and less robustness. Drawing intuitions from the Brownian motions where localized momentum exchanges enable global energy diffusion, we propose an innovative routing protocol, chaotic routing (CR), which achieves efficient information diffusion with seemingly chaotic local information exchanges. Leveraging emerging networking concepts such as potential based routing, opportunistic routing and network coding, CR improves throughput via accurate routing cost estimation, opportunistic data forwarding and localized node scheduling optimizing information propagation in mesh structures. Through extensive simulations, we prove that CR outperforms, in terms of throughput, best deterministic routing scheme (i.e. best path routing) by a factor of around 300% and beats the best opportunistic routing scheme (i.e. MORE) by a factor of around 200%. CR shows stable performance over wide range of network densities, link qualities and batch sizes.