Scalable and Reliable Sensor Network Routing: Performance Study from Field Deployment

Scalable and reliable routing is a critical issue in sensor network deployment. A number of approaches have been proposed for sensor network routing, but sensor field implementation tends to be lacking in the literature. In our study, the problems of scalability and reliability in sensor network routing are addressed through a simple but powerful scheme implemented on Mica2 motes running TinyOS along with other, more widely-used routing protocols. Motes are tested in an outdoor sensor field, and detailed experiments are carried out for performance analysis. This paper presents the implementation details and the results obtained from head-to-head comparison of routing protocols. The proposed protocol delivers 93% of packets injected at a rate of one packet per second in networks with end to end hop distances of over 10 hops-a result which significantly improves upon results from the standard TinyOS routing implementation of MINTRoute. The promising results can be explained by the key protocol properties of reliability (via multi-path redundancy), scalability (with efficiently contained flooding), and flexibility (source-tunable per-packet priority) which are achieved without adding protocol complexity or resource consumption. These strengths enable the protocol to outperform even sophisticated link estimation based protocols especially in adverse outdoor sensor field environments.